Agnes's Final Afternoon: An Essay on the Work of Milan Kundera FROM THE PUBLISHER
Francois Ricard's book joins the great French tradition of the literary essay as a meditation on the writing of Milan Kundera.
Agnes's Final Afternoon imitates the protagonist of Kundera's novel Immortality on the last afternoon of her life. Like all readers of fiction, Agnes steps out of her car - out of the world of planned routes, responsibilities, and social self - and gives herself up to the discovery of a new landscape, an experience that will transform her. Francois Ricard's essay enters into the writings of Milan Kundera in much the same way. The landscape he explores includes a chain of ten novels, composed between 1959 and 1999, and two books containing one of the most lucid reflections on the novel.
SYNOPSIS
Ricard (French literature, McGill U.) explores ten novels (composed between 1959 and 1999) by Milan Kundera. Imitating the protagonist of Immortality (who impulsively leaves her car to walk in the mountains) Ricard aims to abandon the rules and ambitions of literary criticism and instead reflect on the internal experience of reading Kundera. The volume, which is not indexed, was first published in France in 2003 as Le dernier après-midi d'Agnès by Editions Gallimard. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
FROM THE CRITICS
The New York Times
In Agnes's Final Afternoon, an imaginative literary essay, Fran�ois Ricard probes the thematic unities and formal innovations of Kundera's novels to discover this essential. Like Agnes -- a character in Kundera's novel Immortality who takes a detour one afternoon to explore the landscape -- Ricard advocates abandoning theory to penetrate ''the very core of the oeuvre.'' Ricard, who teaches French literature at McGill University, argues that Kundera uses a principle of repetition and variation to compose novels that are ''always the same and yet always new, always evident and always elusive.''
— Roxana Popescu
Library Journal
In this captivating work of literary criticism, Ricard (French, McGill Univ.) uses a final episode of reclusive Czech-French writer Milan Kundera's novel Immortality to explain the entire universe of Kunderian fiction. Kundera, Ricard observes, writes in a nonlinear mode and is especially fond of "ellipses and digressions, abrupt breaks, and deep rifts" without ever allowing the thematic tension to sag. In the novel, protagonist Agnes steps away from her worries to absorb the beauty and repose of the Swiss mountain landscape. This delays her drive back to Paris and thus changes her life; it is this very pause, this linear break, that probably contributes to Agnes's automobile accident and her subsequent death. As Ricard skillfully demonstrates, a "primordial" world lies beneath the surface of Kundera's fiction, a world where there is "no more world, no more laughter, or love. And no more novel." Ricard is a foremost Kundera scholar, having written about his work for more than 15 years and having developed a close relationship with the author. There is a growing interest in Kundera's novels in the United States (seven U.S. editions have been translated from Czech and four from French, including a play and two essays), and though this work won't have much popularity in public libraries, it is definitely recommended for academic libraries. For literary scholars and students, it's a gem.-Bob Ivey, Univ. of Memphis Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
Home
