Farewell Waltz

Klima, 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 Klima s jealous wife, the nurse s 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 Kundera s novels, rich in black humour and profound human insights.