[1] The story springs from a casual gesture of a woman, seemingly to her swimming instructor.

Immortality is the last of a trilogy that includes The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Divided into seven parts, the novel centers on Agnes, her husband Paul, and her sister Laura.

At the start, this narrator sees a woman wave and creates the character of Agnes: "I was strangely moved.

Later, the Kundera character says: "A novel shouldn't be like a bicycle race but a feast of many courses.