Full name: Farewell Waltz: A Novel

Author: Milan Kundera Year: 1972 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Fiction Culture: France Purchase/reserch links: Goodreads Barns&Noble Amazon Google Books LibraryThing ISBNs: 9780571194711 9780060997007 0571194710 0060997001

In this dark farce of a novel, set in an old-fashioned Central European spa town, eight characters are swept up in an accelerating dance: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynecologist; a rich American (at once saint and Don Juan); a popular trumpeter and his beautiful, obsessively jealous wife; an disillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young woman ward. Perhaps the most brilliantly plotted and sheer entertaining of Milan Kundera's novels, Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy. Written in Bohemia in 1969-70, this book was first published (in 1976) in France under the title La valse aux adieux (Farewell Waltz), and later in thirty-four other countries. Similar books: Ignorance by Milan Kundera The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq The Notebook by Agota Kristof Nohow On by Samuel Beckett So Long a Letter by Mariama Ba The Heart by Maylis de Kerangal Joy of Man's Desiring by Jean Giono The Flight of Icarus by Raymond Queneau The Song of the World by Jean Giono Once Upon the River Love by Andrei Makine The Waitress Was New by Dominique Fabre The Great Fire of London by Jacques Roubaud Honeymoon by Patrick Modiano Harvest by Jean Giono W by Georges Perec The File on H by Ismail Kadare Crossing the Mangrove by Maryse Conde The Rover by Joseph Conrad The Last Life by Claire Messud