Monday, Aug. 30, 1976

Magic Molehill?

By R.Z. Sheppard

THE FAREWELL PARTY

by MILAN KUNDERA

209 pages. Knopf. $7.95.

A writer must know how to start a fight. A good writer must know how to finish one. Czechoslovakia's Milan Kundera is a good writer, but like so many other dissident artists in Communist countries, the fights he starts in his satiric novels and stories are lost battles at the outset. In The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere and Laughable Loves, Kundera attempted to shift the combat to that more neutral ground known as the human comedy. Even so, he never really escapes the sadness and bitterness of recent Czech history.

The problem of the self and the state, of the self and others, lies at the heart of The Farewell Party. The novel's setting is a government health spa in an unnamed Eastern European socialist country. The spa caters to women who have fertility problems. A young nurse named Ruzena has no such difficulties. Only one time in bed with a famous touring trumpeter named Klima is enough to leave her pregnant. Klima has all but forgotten Ruzena when she calls some months later with the news. He returns to the fertility spa to try to convince her that she should have an abortion.

As in much Russian and Eastern European satire, an ironic curtain has descended with an unmistakable clang. But there are quieter ironies as well. They deal with human limitations, and the all too human ability to invent illusions that disguise those limitations. For example, there is brilliant Dr. Skreta, head of the spa, a slightly mad scientist who practices personal eugenics by inseminating unwitting patients with his own sperm. A rich American expatriot named Bartleff dispenses fistfuls of U.S. half dollars while preaching a Christianity of joy in which saintly asceticism is practiced out of sheer lust for adulation. Kundera also introduces a character named Jakub, a former political prisoner who believes that the only true freedom in his country is the freedom to commit suicide. To remind himself of this pathetic option, he keeps a poisoned pill with him at all times.

Lethal Dose. Chekhov's dictum about never showing a gun in the first act unless it is used in the third applies to poisoned pills as well. Jakub's lethal dose leads to a death that cries out to be interpreted as either an accidental murder or a murderous accident. Playing existential detective, Kundera shows how all the major characters are implicated. But despite some amusing farcical turns, the verdict is heavily weighted toward a formulation that amounts to a facile existential copout: we are all murderers.

The novel's bright comic surfaces compensate for its lack of depth. But not enough. With its clinical setting and the circle of didactic characters intended to illustrate moral predicaments, The Farewell Party finally seems like a molehill version of The Magic Mountain.

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