This novel, awarded the Italian prize Premio letterario Mondello in 1978, was published by Gallimard in 1976. The British publisher Faber and Faber released an English version that same year. A year later, it was brought out in German by Suhrkamp and in Italian by Adelphi. Sixty-Eight Publishers in Toronto released the Czech version in 1979. In the 1980s, the novel was also available to readers in Poland and Hungary. The novel has been published in 42 languages throughout the world, including among others Malayalam and Sinhala.
Klima, a celebrated jazz trumpeter, receives a phone call announcing that a young nurse with whom he spent a brief night at a fertility spa is pregnant. She has decided he is the father. And so begins a comedy which, during five madcap days, unfolds with ever-increasing speed. Klima’s beautiful, jealous wife, the nurse’s equally jealous boyfriend, a fanatical gynaecologist, a rich American, at once Don Juan and saint, and an elderly political prisoner who, just before his emigration, is holding a farewell party at the spa are all drawn into this black comedy, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As usual, Milan Kundera poses serious questions with a blasphemous lightness which makes us understand that the modern world has taken away our right to tragedy.
(Faber and Faber, online: https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571194711-farewell-waltz)
These were moments of absolute clairvoyance but also of absolute emotion; for the woman who had been ready to sacrifice everything for him, who so understood his thoughts that he could talk to her about Armstrong or Stravinsky, about trivial and serious things, she was closer to him than any other human being…. Then he imaginedthat this lovely body, this lovely face, was dead, and he felt he would be unable to survive her by a single day. He knew that he was capable of protecting her to his last breath, that he was capable of giving his life for her. But this stifling sensation of love was merely a feeble fleeting glimmer, because his mind was wholly preoccupied by anxiety and fear. He lay beside Kamila, he knew he loved her boundlessly, but he was absent mentally. He caressed her face as if he were caressing it from an immeasurable distance some hundreds of kilometers away.
Faber and faber, 2022, p. 22
Ideology convinces one that only it represents absolute truth. This novel shows us that things are relative. An ideology will teach intolerance, a novel will teach understanding. The more ideologized our century becomes, the more anachronistic the novel becomes. But the more anachronistic it becomes, the more necessary it is for people. In today's world, where over-ideologized politics has turned into religion, the novel remains one of the last forms of atheism.
It is no easy to say in a word exactly what The Farewell Party is all about, or to pin down the complications of it’s plot in a few neat phrases, i tis one of those subtle, allusive novels which leave the reader feeling exhilarated and entertained, yet slightly baffled as wel.
„The Farewell Party“ is the kind of „political novel“ a cunning, resourceful, gifted writer writes when it is no longer possible to write political novels.
Like Tom Stoppard, Kundera seems to play an exating game of ping-pong with God. Because he never loses lightness, his seriousness is all the more painful.
It is not easy to take a position on this book. With his irony, Kundera himself obliterates all too stark contradictions. After all, everyone will have to answer the question of who they actually agree with. (…) It is not easy to take a position on this book. With his irony, Kundera himself obliterates all too stark contradictions. After all, everyone will have to answer the question of who they actually agree with. (...) Here it is the old question of guilt or innocence, and it is certainly no coincidence that the names Dostoyevsky and Raskolnikov come up. That the tone is lighter or the events more playful must not diminish the urgency of the question. Nor the despair that implies the only possible answer: there is no life without guilt. Whoever believes that they can stay out of anything is mistaken. The idyll at the end of the book is only an illusion.
Macho admires femininity and desires to rule what he admires. Just as he is enthralled by the archetypal femininity of the dominated woman (her motherliness, fertility, weakness, domesticity, sentimentality, etc.), he is enthralled by his masculinity. The misogynist, on the other hand, is terrified of femininity, fleeing from women who are too feminine. The macho ideal: the family. The ideal of the misogynist: a single man with many mistresses; or: a married man with a beloved wife without children.
(Farewell Waltz)
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