PublishedFaber & Faber, July 2015 |
ISBN9780571316465 |
FormatHardcover, 128 pages |
Dimensions22.2cm × 14.3cm × 1.3cm |
The new novel from Milan Kundera
'Enchanting . it explores all aspects of a declining civilisation without taking any of them too seriously . In this novel of Flaubertian seduction, free of blame and guilt, insignificance is the very essence of life.' La Repubblica
Casting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time completely avoiding realism - that's The Festival of Insignificance. Readers who know Kundera's earlier books know that the wish to incorporate an element of the unserious in a novel is not at all unexpected of him. In Immortality, Goethe and Hemingway stroll through several chapters together talking and laughing. And in Slowness, Vera, the author's wife, says to her husband: you've often told me you meant to write a book one day that would have not a single serious word in it. I warn you: watch out. Your enemies are lying in wait.
Now, far from watching out, Kundera is finally and fully realizing his old aesthetic dream in this novel that we could easily view as a summation of his whole work. A strange sort of summation. Strange sort of epilogue. Strange sort of laughter, inspired by our time, which is comical because it has lost all sense of humor. What more can we say? Nothing. Just read.
Barbara is an award-winning bookseller who has a special interest in fiction, especially Australian fiction and children’s books for all ages.
Czech born Milan Kundera wrote The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being in the 1980s and their theme was life in his country under communism. The Festival of Insignificance is his first novel in over twelve years and is set in Paris, where he has lived for the past 10 years. It’s the story of a group of diverse people who loosely consider themselves as friends. There’s a waiter pretending to be from Pakistan and babbling away in a made-up language, a man pretending to have cancer, a woman whose friendship with a boring man is held together because he is so boring and a character obsessed with navel gazing. The chapters are woven together in bite size pieces and I found joy in the absurd delightful. When I finished the novel I immediately turned back to the first page and re-read the novel as it was so hard to put it down.
