The Farewell Waltz is a Czech

Czech language

Czech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. The language was known as Bohemian in English until the late 19th century...

-language novel by Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera , born 1 April 1929, is a writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke. Kundera has written in...

 published in 1972. A French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 edition was published in 1976 and an English version entitled The Farewell Party.

This novel mostly deals with love, hate and accidents between eight characters who are drawn together in a small spa

Spa

The term spa is associated with water treatment which is also known as balneotherapy. Spa towns or spa resorts typically offer various health treatments. The belief in the curative powers of mineral waters goes back to prehistoric times. Such practices have been popular worldwide, but are...

 town in Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia

Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...

 in early 1970s.

Like most Kundera's work The Farewell Waltz is a book of many layers. On the surface it is a comedy or a burlesque. Still the comedy is just at the top of this story which involves much darker and ambiguous tones.

Frantisek

A guy with a motorbike who believes that Ruzena is his girlfriend, and that he is the father of the child she is carrying. He desperately wants to marry her, even though he knows of her affair with Klima.

Klima

A trumpeteer from a big orchestra, a donjuan who had a one-night stand

One-night stand

Originally, a one-night stand was a single theatre performance, usually by a guest performer on tour, as opposed to an ongoing engagement. Today, however, the term is more commonly defined as a single sexual encounter, in which neither participant has any intention or expectation of a relationship...

 with Ruzena and completely forgot about her until she informed him that she would be having a baby.

Kamila

Formerly a popular songstress, Kamila had to end her career because of health problems. She is Klima's wife and is extremely jealous of her husband and always suspects him of having affairs.

Skreta

A gynecologist at the spa who wants to be adopted by Bertlef so he could become an American citizen, and who has an original method for helping couples that can't have babies (in cases when he suspects that the man is infertile, he uses injections of his own sperm)

Bertlef

A rich American with poor health who has to spend most of his time in the spa town. Thanks to Skreta he and his wife were able to have a baby (it is presumed that this was a case of Skreta's sperm treatment).

Jakub

Jakub is a former political prisoner, who now has received a permission to leave Czechoslovakia. He is paying his last visit to his friend Skreta, who once gave him a pill of poison for committing suicide if he felt that all hope was lost.

Olga

Jakub's "ward" Olga is the daughter of a man who once betrayed Jakub. She believes (because Jakub has told her so) that her father was Jakub's best friend.