Milan Kundera simultaneously draws on an 18th-century French novel and an excursion that he and his wife fancy taking to a castle in France turned into a hotel, to bring to life a series of characters from the past and present who end up coinciding at a congress of entomologists held in its halls. Characters and stories from yesterday and today intertwine in such a way that it will not surprise anyone, for example, that a man clad in a motorcycle helmet, flustered and impatient, speeds away on his motorcycle, while another, with a white wig, drowsy and lost in thought, climbs into a carriage that seems to have come straight out of a picture from the past: the former undoubtedly wishes to leave something behind in a hurry; the latter, on the other hand, seems prepared to reminisce, at the slow pace of the horse, about the night he just spent with the intriguing and seductive Madame de T.
