The affair with Bernard ends, Laura is devastated, and Agnes retreats to Switzerland. As he relates Agnes's story, Kundera also meets with some of the characters involved and-in separate chapters in which he introduces literary greats like Goethe-explores the meaning of immortality, love, fame, and the contemporary preference for images (themes that preoccupy his fictional characters as well). Agnes also has a younger sister, Laura, who, Agnes feels, follows too closely behind her-''She imitated, but at the same time she corrected.'' Laura, who perfectly identifies with her body (unlike Agnes), who sees her body ``as an old factory scheduled for demolition,'' has many affairs-including a torrid one with Bernard, a famous media personality, increasingly uncertain of his worth. Agnes, still mourning the death of her beloved father, yearns for solitude-for a life alone in the mountains of Switzerland away from, but in contact with, husband Paul an daughter Brigitte. The gesture is seminal for Kundera, who begins to create a part-fictional/part- real existence for this woman whom he calls Agnes. In a metafictional conceit that works, Kundera, at his health club in Paris, sees an aging woman make a graceful but casual gesture of farewell to her swimming instructor. There's a wonderfully elegant and provocative story lurking within Kundera's latest, but it's not that easily accessible.
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