After more than 14 years, Milan Kundera presents another piece of wonderful prose, profoundly cheerful - for laughing and crying: four old friends meet at a party. It was chance that led the four Parisian flaneurs there. Ramon, who wants to see the Chagall exhibition, but always shrinks back from the long queue, Charles, who knows how to tell that you couldn't laugh at Stalin's jokes, the actor Caliban, who is no longer offered any roles, and Alain, who still lustingly turns around after the young girls. They talk about the meaningful and the insignificant, about death and forgetting, about communism and sex. What remains of us once we are dead, friends ask themselves and toast to the meaninglessness of being.