Klima, a famous jazz trumpeter, receives a phone call in which he is told that a young nurse with whom he spent a brief night at a fertility clinic is pregnant and that she is saying that he is the father.

And so, begins a comedy which unfolds over five mad days at an increasing speed which involves: Klima's beautiful wife who is very jealous, the nurse's equally jealous boyfriend, a fanatical gynaecologist, a rich American both Don Juan and saint and lastly an elderly political prisoner who is holding a farewell party at the spa just before going into exile.

The author is one of the best-known Czech writers. He went into exile in France in 1975, after the days of the Czech Spring in which he played a leading role.

He became a naturalised French citizen in 1981. Kundera's Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979 but given back to him in 2019.

Now 93 years old, Kundera still lives in France.

After some books of poetry and a one-act play, his first novel and also one of his best was The Joke (1967), a comic description of the private lives and destinies of various Czechs during the years of Stalinism.

His second novel, Life is Elsewhere, 1969, is about a hapless romantic-minded hero who thoroughly embraces the Communist take-over of 1948. This book was forbidden publication in his country.

The book being reviewed today was the first book he published after he moved to France. It was published in 1976. After it came the two books, which made him famous all over the world - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in 1979 and The Unbearable Lightness of Being in 1984.

Thereafter Kundera began writing in French with Slowness in 1994 and Identity in 1997. Ignorance, published in 2000, which tells the story of Czech émigrés, was first published in Spanish while The Festival of Insignificance speaks about a group of Parisian friends.