Refined in the laboratory of social oppression,… Kundera's knowledge of personal freedom leads inexorably to the comic perception of victims of surveillance who are also, in their private ways, master practitioners of the art. So sophisticated is Kundera's rendering of this perception that one would have to look at 18th-century comedies of manners to find comedy and gulling on the scale of that in … The Farewell Party. Here in the festive atmosphere of a health spa and fertility clinic the characters take apparent holiday from the pressures of daily life, and once again love, or more accurately sex, is the swing on which they try to move past their destiny just as it is also the swing which returns them to it.

Like the plot of any rich comedy, that of The Farewell Party is difficult to summarize with its various subplots, counterplots and the numerous meetings between...