Rating: 
Summary: breathtaking start....bogged down to rubbish
Review: I was enchanted by the beginning. Unfortunately, the author seems to have spent his entire inspiration in the openning and to have simply been filling up space with alternating sordid and trite story lines as devices to sustain interest. I was terribly disappointed as every aspect of the novel declined; as I read, I kept hoping that it would improve. I finally skimmed the last third and was relieved to close it. Too bad as the beginning was brillant....
Rating: 
Summary: Good, but only good!
Review: The title accurately relfects the theme of the novel. I mildly enjoyed reading this postmodern construction interspersed with light poetic ruminations on unimportant matters. Unfortunatelly , reading this book has been a perfectly forgettable experience.
Rating: 
Summary: immortality
Review: it is really funny when u are reading "immortality" and ur literature lecturer is seriously talking about Gothe! i nearly laugh when my lecturer talks about Gothe so seriously. it is like kundera's voice has entered into my lecture room~and i am not going to talk too much about the book. comments shouldnt be read unless u have read the book. u know how fun could be lost when u know how the story will go on and how it is all anout. so, try. see if u like it or not. it is like having sex. u never know if it is good or not unless u have experienced it. sometimes good, sometimes not. everything takes time.
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Summary: A perfect balance of the intellect and the heart. Dazzling.
Review: Milan Kundera reaches artistic nirvana with a work which perhaps sums up his ouevre. A sad, utterly compelling novel about life, love and how in our attempts to be immortal we forget about our current existence. A perfect balance in meeting the intellectual with the romantic; rarely achieved in novels even larger in scope. The story is even honest in that it is intertextual. A dazzling work by master craftsman.
Rating:
Summary: best from the best
Review: I have read all books by milan kundera and I have to say that I have read thos book five times, everytime I find something new, a new life true. this is my bible.
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Summary: the kundera you never let go
Review: this is my favorite kundera. more than any other of his works, i find more of kundera himself lurking in these pages. the ideas and revelations in this novel continue to resonate in my life more than a year after reading it. i feel like kundera shared truths with me that i'm not supposed to discover until i'm older. it's like having a piece of life experience handed to you-the challenge is will you know what to do with it.
Rating:
Summary: A dense, wonderfully layered book by world's best author
Review: I am completely enamored of Milan Kundera's books and generally consider him to be my favorite. This is general because my favorites float like feathers in the wind. "Immortality" is a wonderfully layered casserole of seemingly disparate storylines which convene beautifully, simply on a dark country road. So satisfying when finally the snippets of personality, reason, love, angst and whimsy you've been furtively collecting in your mind, not realizing quite yet how they are to come together, do come together in a moment of perfect symmetry. Just wonderful. Plus, the book includes the following passage, which I can't get enough of: "Because that's how things are, and this goes for everyone: We will never find out why we irritate people, what bothers people about us, what they like about us, what they find ridiculous; for us our own image is our greatest mystery." Eat this book for dinner!--love RW Ford
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Summary: Read This Book!!!!
Review: I flew through this book, enchanted. It's scintillating gravity drags you in, swirls you around, and leaves you hovering, like a moon about a planet. Kundera's genius is that he writes novels structured more like symphonies or string quartets than novels. He dispenses with the direct approach to action, allows characters and themes to intermingle in sonata-like freedom and splendor. His sections function like orchestral movements; they differ completely, often feeding on new thematic material; each can function seperately, yet all compliment the whole.
Witness how Agnes' story is studied in some depth. We long for more, but Kundera drags in Gothe, Bettina and Hemmingway; how magical. We are in suspense, waiting to find out about Agnes. Then, back to Agnes and her sister... But what about Gothe? What's the trial both Hemmingway and he are facing in the afterworld? Then there's the stories of the girl who's dead inside because the world won't respond to her, and Ruben's, dead to life in the now, exiled to the Land Beyond Love. And, just where do Avenarius and Ruth fit into this? Or Kundera, the author, who shows up in an Eischerian recursiveness. Strangely, all these stories fit together, and drive the novel; the compulsion to follow these characters draws us further in. This is storytelling at its artful best.
Another thing truly remarkable about Kundera is his subtle use of ideas; his is a novelistic universe where ideas, stated or mused about in the first person (Yes... you know its Kundera, not a character, thinking these thoughts) become themes in a fugue that runs paralell to, though distinct from, the action. The voices in this fugue are quite charming, insightful as Vonnegut's, yet never clumsy as, say, Robbins' can get; in fact, these idea-themes raise more questions than they answer. Love is examined; from the passionate, almost hysterical loves of Bettina and Ruth, to the detatched, though honest love of Agnes, to the empty, loveless physical eroticism of Reubens that fails to resonate because he gives nothing of himself to his lovers, and takes none of them in. Another idea-theme is image versus substance. Modern culture is obsessed with image, not substance. Where is the boundry between real and imagined? This leads to an examination of immortality; how we live on only through those we touch, yet, of course, their images of us are not us. What, if anything, lays beyond? Heavy stuff with a light touch.
Kundera succeeds where a lot of structural modernists fail because he seems intoxicated with life, love, people and their foibles, and thus draws engagingly real characters, not the shadowy half-things of Pynchon, or Joyce's labrynthine characters, in extremely complex structures... In this case, a structure arguably more complex that "Ulysses" or "Gravity's Rainbow".
Yet I don't want to scare readers off. Those are books I read like medicine; they taste bad, but someone told me its good for me. "Immortality", I'll re-read because I love it; It's the very best book I've read in a long, long time, if not my whole life.
Rating:
Summary: excellent
Review: If you like Kundera, you'll like this one. Undoubtedly his best work.
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Summary: Kundera on the Appetites of Titans--love, death, & fame
Review: We best know Milan Kundera for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the novel and movie set during the 1968 Russian invasion of Prague. Now, with a fine translation by Peter Kussi, Kundera has written Immortality, a novel about life, popular culture and the fiery chemistry of love and fame. The revelry begins with the casual wave of a woman's arm. Kundera's captivating prose soars from that gesture and we soon know Agnes and her family. As a character in his own novel, Kundera ponders modern culture and its emphasis of image over substance. Since he achieved fame through the film of his previous book, it is ironic that his disdain extends to movies. Yet he insists novels should be written so they are impossible to adapt to the screen. Kundera's presence gives the book an intriguing synchronicity: The events that inspire the writer are simultaneously happening to his characters. Immortality's counterpoint is a romance between the aging poet Goethe and a young woman hungry for a slice of his fame. The conversations in heaven between Goethe and Hemingway are stunning. Repeatedly, as we are about to question the relevancy of Kundera's fascinating insights, they become integral to the story with surprising twists of irony. With finely balanced plot, sub-plot and theme, Kundera propels us beyond the word into a vision of immortality.
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