Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Farewell Waltz: A Novel
    Farewell Waltz: A Novel
    Farewell Waltz: A Novel
    Audiobook7 hours

    Farewell Waltz: A Novel

    Written by Milan Kundera

    Narrated by Richmond Hoxie

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    ""After Farewell Waltz there cannot be any doubt. Kundera is a master of contemporary literature. This novel is both an an example of virtuosity and a descent into the human soul."" —L'Unite

    Set in an old-fashioned Central European spa town, 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.

    In this dark farce of a novel, 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; and an disillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young woman ward. It is perhaps the most brilliantly plotted and sheer entertaining of Milan Kundera's novels.

    Written in Bohemia in 1969-70, the book was first published (in 1976) in France under the title La valse aux adieux (Farewell Waltz), and later in thirty-four other countries. This beautiful translation, made from the French text prepared by the novelist himself, fully reflects Kundera's own tone and intentions, and offers an opportunity for both the discovery and the rediscovery of one of the very best of a great writer's works.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateAug 21, 2012
    ISBN9780062215598
    Farewell Waltz: A Novel
    Author

    Milan Kundera

    The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929 - 2023) was born in Brno and lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves—all originally in Czech. His later novels, Slowness, Identity, Ignorance, and The Festival of Insignificance, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.

    More audiobooks from Milan Kundera

    Related to Farewell Waltz

    Related audiobooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Two Poems by Charles Baudelaire

      Jun 9, 2020

      After my friend and I left the tobacco shop, he carefully sorted his loose change; slipped some small gold coins in his left jacket pocket; into the right went the silver pieces; in his left pants pocket, a handful of centimes; and in the right, a si

      2 min read

    • Article

      The Machine Stops

      Dec 28, 2018

      The Machine Stops
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Dying Of The Light

      Dec 13, 2023

      The Dying Of The Light
      7 min read

    • Article

      A Lucky Gazan Routine?

      Nov 28, 2023

      A Lucky Gazan Routine?
      4 min read

    • Article

      Old Lesbian Love

      Mar 5, 2024

      The sexual objectification of the body, of our bodies, is less an insult these days and more of a goal.  The post Old Lesbian Love appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Evil On The Air Waves

      Oct 1, 2019

      Evil On The Air Waves
      4 min read

    • Article

      Last Conversations With My Mother

      Jun 17, 2019

      Last Conversations With My Mother
      3 min read

    • Article

      ‘Sing to It’: Featured Fiction from Amy Hempel

      Mar 25, 2019

      If she was home at night in her husband’s bed, did he care what she did with her days? The post ‘Sing to It’: Featured Fiction from Amy Hempel appeared first on The Millions.

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Care-Giver

      Mar 1, 2020

      The Care-Giver
      13 min read

    • Article

      Begin Again

      Jun 14, 2022

      My grandfather came to live with me. There was nowhere else for him to go. What had happened to all his children? Death, decay, exile—I hardly know. My own parents died of pain. But I must not be too gloomy, at the beginning, or you will leave me, an

      6 min read

    • Article

      Tell Children the Truth

      Sep 14, 2021

      Tell Children the Truth
      6 min read

    • Article

      Birdie

      Jan 14, 2020

      Birdie
      24 min read

    • Article

      Brave Heart, New Hope

      Jul 21, 2021

      Brave Heart, New Hope
      7 min read

    • Article

      Hell Is A City in Texas

      Jun 14, 2021

      Hell Is A City in Texas
      10 min read

    • Article

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary

      Jun 17, 2020

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary
      7 min read

    • Article

      Nothing To Fear

      Jan 26, 2021

      Nothing To Fear
      8 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems by Szilárd Borbély

      Jun 15, 2018

      The Eternalis like the axthe assassin slamsinto someone’s head. The Eternal is the actof pillage from whichin panic the garretnow is empty. The Eternal is scarlet,like fresh blood. Above itrises a vapor.Then it, too, disappears. The Eternal is liketh

      2 min read

    • Article

      Love & miracles

      Aug 14, 2022

      Delia Ephron, the screen-writer, novelist and wit, was in her apartment in Greenwich Village in New York City when I phoned. She was disappointed we weren’t doing the interview via video. “That’s too bad. I look fabulous.” She is appearing, virtually

      7 min read

    • Article

      Mothers As Makers Of Death

      Aug 14, 2018

      Mothers As Makers Of Death
      8 min read

    • Article

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary

      Jun 17, 2020

      Mrs Macarthur’s Secret Diary
      7 min read

    • Article

      Freedom

      Aug 6, 2020

      Freedom
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Plagues Steph Cha

      Sep 29, 2020

      The Plagues Steph Cha
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Abortions I Have Known

      Mar 17, 2019

      The Abortions I Have Known
      10 min read

    • Article

      Why I Don’t Write

      Mar 7, 2019

      Why I Don’t Write
      6 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Farewell Waltz

    3.5/5

    342 ratings7 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Lovely book, recognizable Kundera style. Full of humor and unconventional ideas. Great audio quality!
    • 4/5
      A mildly farcical romantic intrigue, involving various couples over a 5 day period in a fertility period. Kundera demonstrates the unpredictable and random nature of associations, and the distances between intimates.
    • 4/5
      The memory of this one contains something jagged, like a sharp lazily tossed into a bin liner, only to poke an unsuspecting leg on the way out to the street. This novel whispers you might not recreate the plot but the deceipt will cling to your hair and clothes.
    • 4/5
      pretty sweet. Kundera remains one of those authors who can leave me consistently and completely disoriented.
    • 2/5
      Reading this thirty years on, I can't help wondering why we were all so bowled over by Kundera back in the eighties. It's a flimsy black comedy without very much to say, and reads more like a film script than a novel. What cleverness there is comes over as movie-cleverness: rapid scene changes, parallel stories, throwaway lines. The whole mood is profoundly sexist, and there's no evidence to suggest that Kundera intended any irony by setting the story in a fertility spa: this is still the old world where men sit around discussing life, the universe and everything, whilst women fulfil themselves by having babies. If their husbands can't manage it, there's the good doctor to cure them with his magic syringe. As so often with translations, the (UK) English title seems to have been thought up by someone who hasn't read the book. There is neither a party nor any dancing in the book, but Farewell Waltz (corresponding to La valse aux adieux, the title of the original French edition) makes sense in a way that The Farewell Party doesn't: you can have a metaphorical waltz, but who ever heard of a metaphorical party?
    • 4/5
      everything by kundera seems to define melancholy. this is one of my favorites.
    • 3/5
      Spanning five days in a Czechoslovakian fertility resort, this is a light(ish), breezy, humorous novel of romance, deception, life decisions and good byes.Razena, a nurse at the clinic, is pregnant and has decided renowned trumpet play Klima is the father of the child - not the clumsy and desperate teenager Franti. Klima is horrified at the news and tries to talk her into having an abortion, using a rackety reverse psychology tactic dictated to him by his band. Political liability Jakob is at the resort to say his good-byes to a couple of friends before leaving the country for good. Olga desperatly wants to be his lover rather than his sort-of stepdaugther, once at least. Klima's wife is torn by her jealousy and scared of finding proof at the same time. And doctor Skreta, who himself might be the father of all the children concieved through insemination at the clinic, tries to give American millioneer Bertlef subtle hints to adopt him as his son.It's a clever and fast-paced weave Kundera gives us here, full of twists and even with a bit of "ticking bomb" suspension in the form of a tablet of poison being mixed in with medical pills. It would undoubtedly make a good film or play.What brings the rating down by at least one star for me is the book's stale sexism. Even though there are as many female characters as male ones in this polyphonic novel, the tilted balance is striking. The men think and talk about existence, religion, friendship and the nature of women. The women think about the men they are hot for. In the book's concluding "solution", it becomes rather unpleasant and cynical in (as far as I can tell) a rather unintended way.