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How long does it take to read The Farewell Party?

Milan Kundera

The Farewell Party by Milan Kundera takes about 4 hours 25 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 4 hours 25 minutes

A weekend read

First published 1976. 241 pages, about 66,275 words.

9 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 7 hours 22 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 4 hours 25 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 2 hours 46 minutes

The page count is the median across 38 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

In this dark farce of a novel, set in an old-fashioned Central European spa town, eight characters are swept up in an accelerating dance: a pretty nurse and her repairman boyfriend; an oddball gynecologist; a rich American (at once saint and Don Juan); a popular trumpeter and his beautiful, obsessively jealous wife; and unillusioned former political prisoner about to leave his country and his young woman ward. Perhaps the most brilliantly plotted and sheerly entertaining of Milan Kundera's novels, Farewell Waltz poses the most serious questions with a blasphemous lightness that makes us see that the modern world has deprived us even of the right to tragedy. Written in Bohemia in 1969-70, this book was first published (in 1976) in France under the title La valse aux adieux (Farewell Waltz), and later in thirty-four other countries. This beautiful new translation, made from the French text prepared by the novelist himself, fully reflects his own tone and intentions. As such it offers an opportunity for both the discovery and the rediscovery of one of the very best of a great writer's work.

Subjects: Health resorts, Fiction, Fiction, general, Fiction, erotica, general, Badeort, Liebesbeziehung

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