IMMORTALITY by Milan Kundera
Translated by Peter Kussi; Grove Weidenfeld; 345 pages; $21.95
Not everyone will be pleased to hear that a character named Mr. Kundera moves through the pages of this novel. Even more dispiriting, this Mr. Kundera is an author, and the book he is writing turns out to be the very one that readers of Immortality will hold in their hands. What the world scarcely needs at this moment is more self-referential fiction. The postmodernist point that art is, um, artificial has probably sunk in by now and does not require further demonstrations.
But the Kundera character does...