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 Milan 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.
(from publisher)
The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves-all originally in Czech. His more recent novels, Slowness, Identity, and Ignorance, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.
Milan Kundera is one of the best Czech-born writers. Everytime he publishes a new novel it is a reason for a small literary celebration. The Festival of Insignificance is definitely worth reading, mentioning and nominating. The novel focuses on the musings of four male friends living in Paris. The protagonists discuss, among other topics, their relationships with women and existentialism faced by individuals in the world.
| Author | Milan Kundera |
|---|---|
| Country | CZ |
| Nominating Library | Czech Republic, Městská knihovna Třinec |
| Publisher | HarperCollins USA |
| Translation | Translated from the original French by Linda Asher |
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