Readers are taken through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than 200 years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the ridiculous. They provide merely a narrative framework for Kundera's novel, within which is condensed existential analysis.
The French-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in the Czech Republic and has lived in France since 1975. He died in Paris in 2023.