Books

Welcome to the beta version of Shelfari’s new Book Detail pages!

These pages are editable by the community, so please contribute! Click here to learn more about this feature. We’d love to hear your feedback.

see page history

Description

A young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing; one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover -- these are the two couples whose story is told in this masterful novel. In a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by... read more

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis

Write a ridiculously simplified synopsis.

Memorable Quotes

  • “...the idea of eternal return implies a perspective from which things appear other than as we know them: they appear without the mitigating circumstance of their transitory nature. This mitigating circumstance prevents us from coming to a verdict. For how can we condemn something that is ephemeral, in transit? in the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia, even the guillotine... in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore cynically permitted."”
    Narrator
  • “The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities”
  • “Yes, a husband's funeral is a wife's true wedding”

First Sentence

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum!

Authors & Contributors

  1. Milan Kundera (Author)
  2. Michael Henry Heim
 

Books with Additional Background Information

List the books that contain additional information about this book.

Books That Influenced This Book

List the books that influenced this book.


If you have any suggestions for how we can improve this page or if there are sections that you would like us to add, please let us know.

Advertisement