This highly original book imitates the protagonist, Agnès, of Kundera's novel Immortality. Like all readers of fiction, when Agnès steps out of the car, she steps out of the world of planned routes, responsibilities, and social self, and gives herself up to the discovery of a new landscape, an experience that will transform her. François Ricard's beautiful essay enters into the writings of Milan Kundera in much the same way. The landscape he explores in Agnès's Final Afternoon includes a chain of ten novels, composed between 1959 and 1999; he takes us through the themes and characters of the novels, their structural composition, and innovations of form and content that stretch the boundaries of the novel to breaking point.François Ricard is a Professor of French Literature at McGill University. He has been writing about the work of Milan Kundera for fifteen years.
Aaron Asher Book order (chronological)
A young Czech whose mother has molded him into a poet becomes the people's literary hero during a Communist rally in 1948
In this novel, Kundera whirls through comedy and tragedy, towards his central question: 'how does a person, any person, live today?' Towards his answer he writes of politics, sex, literature, modern man's alienation and of their antidotes.