The Farewell Party

Published simultaneously with Identity, his new novel, here is a masterful new translation of Milan Kundera’s most brilliantly plotted and sheerly entertaining novel — a dark farce of sex, murder, and motherhood. Set in an Old-Fashioned Central European Spa Town, Farewell Waltz follows the lives of eight characters: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynecologist; a rich American who is at once a saint and a Don Juan; a popular trumpeter and his beautiful obsessively jealous wife; a disillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young female ward. Perhaps the most accessible 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.

Translated from the French text prepared by the author himself a quarter century after the novel was originally written, Farewell Waltz sparkles anew with wit, humor, and irony. A valuable addition to HarperFlamingo’s impressive Kundera backlist, it offers readers a chance to discover, or rediscover, one of the very best works of a legendary writer.

“It is hard to imagine anything more chilling and profound that Kundera’s apparent lightheartedness”. — Elizabeth Pochoda

“Kundera … remains faithful to this subtle, wily, devious talent for a fiction of ‘erotic possibilities”. — New York Times Book Review