Rating: 
Summary: thank you, Kundera!
Review: I typically wish to write reviews of some profundity. here i will just gush my feelings. never in a long long time have i enjoyed every single page in a book. never in a long long time did the last page of a book made me sad this experience is over. this book had to be read to be believed. thank you Milan Kundera. oh, did you gain a fan.
Rating:
Summary: A Work of Art
Review: In this amazing book, Kundera reveals the human condition of his characters and the forms it can take. It makes you see all humanity in a different way and while Kundera, himself, steps on stage he challenges the reader and his emotions. But more than anything it is a novel about Agnes, the main character; even when Agnes is off stage it is a novel for her. What Kundera says in the first two pages will stay with you forever and will mark the tone of voice the novel will have: it will be philosophical, historical, ironic and tragic. Throughout the book, he will combine the sense of loss, of memory, of forgetting, of immortality, and of love. If you like books that challenge your intellect, your emotions and the way you see the world, then this book will not disappoint you and will definitely change the way you see life and yourself.
Rating:
Summary: Unique
Review: This was the first Kundera I read, as a result of a friends recomendation, and I was extremely immpressed.
Mr Kundera creates a novel of that rare species here: essentially I am unable to classify it, yet it made me think more deeply than usual and consider the entire world in an entirely different light when I managed to drag myself away from its pages.
The novel opens with Kundera himself witnessing an old woman making a gesture which he believes belies her age: quickly Kundera considers the fact that gestures themselves are immortal: many people have lived throughout history but they have utilized relatively few gestures.
Surprisingly, Kundera weaves an entire character out of this simple gesture, invents friends, relatives, thoughts and feelings for her, and eventually manages to intertwine her life with his own, projecting himself into his own novel, although so subtely do the two stories interlock that when we suddenly realise what has occured slow and joyful understanding blossoms upon our faces.
Along the way, Kundera uses the tale of the great German poet Goethe and the woman Bettina Von Arnim as a kind of historical paradigm for his modern tragedy, paints us a brief but fantastical picture of Hemingway and Goethe conversing beyond this worlds boundaries and, of course, muses upon the nature of Immortality, as well as tackling serious world issues with characteristic Kundera informality.
Kundera is witty and profound: many of the social and cultural observations included in this book made me laugh out loud. His discourse on such diverse subjects as music, world government, sex and the paths gossip take are so wonderfully woven into the primary story they seem to creep into your brain and only surface later, at which point one can nod admiringly at Kundera's wisdom.
Undoubtedly, a book I would not heitate to recommend, this novel should be read carefully and lovingly by eveyone.
Rabidly intelligent, astonishingly well written, ambitious, experimental and indispensable to the thoughtful reader.
Rating: 
Summary: Forgotten Childhood Emotions
Review: This is a great book!Mysterious, fantastic, and yet very well grounded in everyday [European] life. Much of the time Kundera is expansively challenging his readers with his unique blend of the intellect and spirit. One of his recurring themes is that part of us remains a child throughout our whole life, even to death. It is unfortunate to lose touch with these feelings of youth. 'Twisted shards of broken dreams
Lie dashed on the
Buckled slab of
Ungiving Distain.'
Rating:
Summary: An immortal accomplishment
Review: An astonishing book, a seamless marriage of storytelling and philosophy, the real and the imagined. It makes one think without being pedantic. Blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, Kundera fictionalizes real people, even himself, yet grounds his fictional characters in a tangible reality. Even structurally the book stands out, large parts of it being arranged in brief segments of only a few pages, ideal to read in quick bursts then think about their meaning. "Immortality" sows a universe of fresh thought in the mind, contains more insight in a few hundred pages than most of us could articulate in a lifetime. Where else will you find Hemingway having a chat with Goethe? Where else will you find passages with such incisive titles as "The Brilliant Ally of His Own Gravediggers"? This is a book of ambitious scope and magnificent execution.
Rating:
Summary: A NOVEL RUNS WITH CHAMBER MUSIC
Review: The flow of Kundera runs like several lines of the chamber music, weaving with light and heavy, sense and sensibility, hardness and emptiness. We float in different chorus lines, moved by the "leading motives" and "variations" of each character. The writer broke the boundary of fantasy and truth, bringing alive Agnes, who soon developed her own thought and awareness. She was dead in the end, but left a vivid path of struggle for us to retrospect ourselves.
Rating:
Summary: So enjoyable!
Review: This is one of those books that I really hate finishing. Kundera's best novel. I read here an author at ease with his capacity, form, wishes and all his reveled and unrevealed psyche. To a certain degree (and allowing for huge differences in style and encyclopedic knowledge), I can say he is similar to Mann in intention. But what I love most are those beautiful images he draws (without exagerating the detail), the wit and candor expressed in those. I can imagine him being an excellent photographer/painter too.
Rating: 
Summary: Perhaps I'm not cerebral enough?
Review: I may be old fashioned. It's always been my impression that first and foremost the novel must entertain. Only when the novel has succeeded at capturing the readers attention should it then attempt to employ those many other academic writing techniques often used to give the entertaining story lasting significance. e.g. thematic undercurrents, symbolism, ligquistic significance and experimentation. Having said this, it seems that Kundera spent quite a bit of time philosophising about this and that and playing with the form of the novel, and not enough time relaying "a good 'ol fashioned" story. If you're interested in reading a contemporary philosophy text that talks and talks and talks about the contemporary novel and its current purpose in society, then there are probably quite a few good ones out there: Immortality, however, is not top on my list. And if you should happen to be a simple person like myself, who's read enough texts on philosophy this or philosophy that to last several lifetimes, and would merely like to find a darned good, masterfully written yarn, then look elsewhere because this book didn't do that for me either. That's my two cents...
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful.
Review: This is my favorite of the Kundera novels I've read. It's experimental, rhapsodical, hysterical, and the most intellectual novel I've ever read. Kundera writes himself as an author who is writing this novel from the inside out. Gestures and radio programs inspire him to generate other characters, but beyond this, he and his friend Professor Avenarius actually interact with some of these creations. The section of the book that the Kundera character wanted to call "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" is one of my all-time favorite passages. I'd recommend this book to any quasi-intelligent free-thinker.
Rating: 
Summary: miserable
Review: Milan Kundera's most widely know and widely read novel, the Unbearable Lightness of Being tells a complex story of love and turmoil with the author's own philosophical annotations, while not always keeping linear narration. Immortality reads like such an experimental novel gone terribly wrong. Instead of gently, unraveling characters with an analytic mind, Immortality finds Kundera sloppily going off on tangents, musing about everything from astronomy to Goethe to the German language and other seemingly random subjects while his characters take a back seat. Not that I would call that a tragedy seeing as they are generally middle-class, middle management, middle age, whiny, bores. The only tragedy is this self-indulgent and pretensious book every saw the light of day without some serious reconstructing. When I move into a college dorm in a week, this is one of only two books from my collection so bad that I plan on just leaving it behind at my parents' house. The other one is leaps and bounds better than Immortality.
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