Milan Kundera, página 5 de 13

A heady, existential tale of seduction and romance by the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being.An artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere.Salman RushdieKundera designs fictions of the highest order.Ian McEwanAudacity, wit and sheer brilliance.New York Times Book ReviewIn a French chateau on a midsummers night, two tales of seduction entwine, separated in time by over two hundred years, but united in their quest for sensual pleasure. Through their romantic endeavors, a contemporary holidaymaker and eighteenth-century chevalier illustrate our eras obsession with the vulgar demon of speed - and the phenomenon of the dancer.Oscillating between the sublime and ridiculous, the historic and the modern, Kunderas first novel written in French is an enchanting libertine fantasy, radiant with intelligence and wisdom.

A dazzling tragicomic tale from the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being.Anyone reading Kunderas books is unlikely to forget them. They have an essential energy, a difference. New StatesmanKundera is a self-confessed hedonist in a world beset by politics . . . Marvellous.Salman RushdieKlima, a celebrated jazz trumpeter, learns that a young nurse with whom he spent one brief night at a fertility spa is pregnant - and she has decided he is the father. Thus begins a whirlwind farce as he returns to the spa: an accelerating dance which unfolds over five madcap days, encompassing Klimas jealous wife, the nurses equally jealous boyfriend, a fanatical gynaecologist, a rich American (at once Don Juan and saint) and an elderly political prisoner who is holding a farewell party before emigration. Posing serious philosophical questions with his inimitable blasphemous lightness, Farewell Waltz is perhaps the most purely entertaining of Kunderas novels, rich in black humour and profound human insights.

This is the new novel from Milan Kundera. "Enchanting...it explores all aspects of a declining civilisation without taking any of them too seriously...In this novel of Flaubertian seduction, free of blame and guilt, insignificance is the very essence of life." (La Repubblica). Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time completely avoiding realism - that's The Festival of Insignificance. Readers who know Kundera's earlier books know that the wish to incorporate an element of the "unserious" in a novel is not at all unexpected of him. In Immortality, Goethe and Hemingway stroll through several chapters together talking and laughing. And in Slowness, Vera, the author's wife, says to her husband: "you've often told me you meant to write a book one day that would have not a single serious word in it...I warn you: watch out. Your enemies are lying in wait." Now, far from watching out, Kundera is finally and fully realizing his old aesthetic dream in this novel that we could easily view as a summation of his whole work. A strange sort of summation. Strange sort of epilogue. Strange sort of laughter, inspired by our time, which is comical because it has lost all sense of humor. What more can we say? Nothing. Just read.

Thomas Maggs, the son of the local publican, lives with his parents and sister in a village on the Suffolk coast in 1914. He is the youngest child, and the only son surviving. Life is quiet - shaped by the seasons, fishing and farming and the summer visitors. Then one day a mysterious Scotsman arrives. To Thomas he looks for all the world like a detective, in his black cape and hat of felted wool, and the way he puffs on his pipe as if he's Sherlock Holmes. Mac is what the locals call him when they whisper about him in the inn. And whisper they do, for he sets off on his walks at unlikely hours, and stops to examine the humblest flowers. He is seen on the beach, staring out across the waves as if he's searching for clues. But Mac isn't a detective, he's the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and together with his red-haired artist wife, they soon become a source of fascination and wonder to Thomas. Yet just as Thomas and Mac's friendship begins to blossom, war with Germany is declared. The summer guests flee and are replaced by regiments of soldiers on their way to Belgium, and as the brutality of war weighs increasingly heavily on this coastal community, they become more suspicious of Mac and his curious behaviour...In this tender and compelling story of an unlikely friendship, Esther Freud paints a vivid portrait of a home front community during the First World War, and of a man who was one of the most brilliant and misunderstood artists of his generation.

TRIDENT CATALAN Observaciones : IDIOMA PREFIJADO EL CATALÁN.

Edición especial 50.º aniversario Tusquets Editores. Una brillante disección del amor en nuestros días que se ha convertido en uno de los grandes hitos de la literatura contemporánea.Ésta es una historia de amor, o sea de celos, de sexo, de traiciones y tambien de las debilidades y paradojas de la vida cotidiana de dos parejas cuyos destinos se entrelazan. Los celos de Teresa por Tomas, el terco amor de este por ella, opuesto a su irrefrenable deseo de otras mujeres, el idealismo de Franz, amante de Sabina, y la necesidad de esta, amante tambien de Tomas, de perseguir una libertad que tan solo la conduce a la insoportable levedad del ser, se convierten de simple anecdota en reflexion sobre problemas que nos afectan a todos.Esta edicion especial conmemora el 50.º aniversario de Tusquets Editores.

« Oui, j'y voyais clair soudain : la plupart des gens s'adonnent au mirage d'une double croyance : ils croient à la pérennité de la mémoire (des hommes, des choses, des actes, des nations) et à la possibilité de réparer (des actes, des erreurs, des péchés, des torts). L'une est aussi fausse que l'autre. La vérité se situe juste à l'opposé : tout sera oublié et rien ne sera réparé. Le rôle de la réparation (et par la vengeance et par le pardon) sera tenu par l'oubli. Personne ne réparera les torts commis, mais tous les torts seront oubliés. »