In an afterword to the Czech version of Immortality (1992), Kundera disavows a specific stance as social commentator, noting that his works are less concerned with the culture of spectacle than with the understanding that each man carries within him the seed of selfregard through the gaze of others, a seed that is projected into larger, more social spaces. At the same time, it is difficult to read his explorations of the "terminal paradoxes" of our contemporary era without noting the pointed, indeed inescapable, cultural critique present there. In this novel, for the first time, is the milieu of socialist Czechoslovakia left behind, in favor of a setting that is both Kundera's adopted city and thoroughly "Western" as well.
The Paris his characters inhabit is present-day: awash in consumerism, technology, image manipulation. Indeed, Kundera notes,.....
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