From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an unexpected and enchanting novel—the culmination of his life's work.
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.
“There is a timeless quality to his philosophy about the importance of laughter…Kundera is still the powerful and incisive writer he always was.” — New York Times Book Review
“Compelling…That Kundera has his tongue half in his cheek is part of the charm… offers both a continuation of Kundera’s signature investigations and a reaction to the toxicity of the present day.” — Los Angeles Times
“Kundera doesn’t present himself as a priest of the novel who, having been inducted into its higher mysteries, now deigns to share his brilliance with mere mortals. He is simply one character among others in the novel, curious, perplexed, and amused by the spectacle of human nature.” — New Republic
“Kundera is a master at uniting disparate characters by tracing their intersecting journeys, and by allowing resonant words inside the head of one character to sing inside the thoughts of another.” — The Atlantic
“An entertaining divertissement, a lightly comic fiction blending Gallic theorizing and Russian-style absurdity…This is, in short, just the book for an idle afternoon spent sipping espresso and watching the passing show on the Boulevard Saint-Michel or Connecticut Avenue.” — Michael Dirda, Washington Post
“Stunningly profound…a late-career confection which, in its compact slimness, re-proves Kundera’s chops when it comes to overlapping narratives and beautifully expressing the junk and clutter of the modern world.” — NPR Books
“Slender but weighty, thoroughly cerebral…It comes as a welcome corrective to so much American-style realist fiction, which in heavy doses can blur into a kind of sameness…what is moving about this novel is its embrace of what has always driven Kundera, the delicate state of living between being and nothingness. Far from rehashing this theme, it presses it into new form: shorter, tighter, fired by aging rather than by coming of age. It would be a poor fit for Hollywood, but it’s a perfect one for Kundera, and for anyone who has looked at life in hindsight.” — Boston Globe
