Milan Kundera"s sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert"s Emma or Tolstoy"s Anna, Kundera"s Agnès becomes an object of fascination, of indefinable longing. From that character springs a novel, a gesture of the imagination that both embodies and articulates Milan Kundera"s supreme mastery of the novel and its purpose: to explore thoroughly the great themes of existence.