The Festival of Insignificance: A Novel Hardcover – Deckle Edge, June 23, 2015

A book of such beguiling and sensuous intrigue that it eludes description. “Lightly comic” as Michael Dirda’s blurb insists or profoundly tragic? Its slimness is a ruse: this book is a fractal—infinite in its cloying, alliterative and symbolic splendor. Kundera has, in a hundred or so pages, revealed more intimately than most of his contemporaries can in a thousand the ineluctable sorrow of the human condition in the afterglow of the twentieth century.

I read this cover to cover with a great big smile on my face.Usually Kundera is to the novel what Beethoven is to symphonies. This is one of his chamber pieces, light as Mozart, a comedy so French half the words didn't even need to be translated. (The armagnac is on the armoire.)In my imagination it was a Wes Anderson movie, starring Bill Murray as Ramon and Steve Martin as Alain, with the Stalin scenes in stop-motion animation.

Bought it for diversity from my usual reads, hard for me to get into but it was a good read overall.

French-Czech (Czech by birth, French by adoption) writer Kundera’s slim new novel has received mixed reviews to date and though I think I understand why some reviewers had problems with it, I think they’re wrong. I don’t feel that way just a little, I feel it a lot. This is a good book, just not so much novel as a reflection on man’s fate and foibles, offered in scenes of glancing contact among five associates and friends. It’s a novel by the same logic as why the great French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot’s secret plays (“Rameau’s Nephew,” “Jacques the Fatalist,” D’Alembert’s Dream”) are plays: they’re all really just an excuse to talk about ideas elegantly and playfully.It starts with one man (Alain) noticing that all the young women he sees passing him on a Paris street are showing their navels. He is provoked to reflect on the sources of erotic appeal: thighs, buttocks, breasts, and now navels. Without transition, it shifts another character’s (D’Ardello’s) meeting with his doctor. D’Ardello learns that no, he doesn’t have cancer and no, he’s not in imminent risk of dying. He runs into Ramon outside the office –neither very much likes the other but they don’t admit it—and tells him for no reason that he can figure out that he’s learned he’s dying: he’s having a cocktail party to celebrate the news so won’t you come please? And then to Charles and Caliban, who temp as waiters –in this case, it will be D’Ardello’s party—but Caliban doesn’t want to have to converse with the guests so he pretends to be Pakistani and speaks a made up, completely fictitious mock-Pakistani gabble and Charles speaks it back to him. At the party will be Quaquelique (what a name –full of ‘whats’ and ‘whos’ and written with three Qs!) who never says anything interesting, mumbles instead of talking in full voice, and always winds up leaving parties with the prettiest women, who respond to his insignificance and against D’Ardello’s booming brilliance.Then an anecdote about Stalin, supposedly from Khrushchev’s memoir, but nobody remembers who Khrushchev was now, and none of the characters involved in the anecdote seemed to realize that Stalin wasn’t serious, he was teasing the other people in the story. Caliban says, why didn’t anyone understand he was joking. Charles replies: “Because nobody around him any longer knew what a joke was. And in my view, that’s the beginning of a whole new period of history.” The chapter ends in a discussion of how people think they connect but really don’t, how we’re all separated “observation posts, each … standing in a different place in time,” talking across to each other.A steadily vanishing past, the disappearance of jokes, everyone separated from everyone else, false language in place of real, the root source of erotic desire –these are all themes that have appeared in Kundera before, most notably in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which remains my favorite book by him. As before, and like his exemplar Diderot, Kundera presents serious thoughts in the process of relating a dance: people –and ideas—come together, touch and whirl in circle a while and then separate, and new partners come in. Wisdom, in Kundera’s fiction, is presented in the midst of farce, just as it was in Diderot. Kant and Hegel are referenced, Schopenhauer even more –the world Kundera writes about is more willed than thing. Things referenced earlier in the book surface at the end and don’t so much reconcile and coexist –in a dance.The translator, Linda Asher, deserves praise for her elegant translation. Nothing is resolved in this thoughtful, pensive but also humorous little book, but questions –or thoughts- are raised in the mind of the reader.

it is Kundera and it is not Immortality.It is full of sarcasm, nostalgia and self imposed dissatisfaction. It reads like someones diary, or last thoughts that need to be put out there for the world to ponder. Not a must read, but could be appreciated in a certain mood.

This is a provocative, intellectual novel that any fan of Kundera will appreciate and probably read twice, as I did. He is ever-aware of life's pitfalls and connections. I have always found him interesting and compelling.

Kundera demonstrates that he is still the best of the post-moderns. Elegant writing filled with visual images that stay in the mind, returning the reader to an insight for more and more consideration.

It's hard to fault the printing press for the fact that this, likely to be Milan Kundera's last novel published during his life, is really bad and boring. Gone is the gravitas of The Joke or The Farewell Waltz; absent is the humor of Laughable Loves and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Really it feels like an AI tried to write a Kundera novel but instead decided to just obsess over women's midriffs. I get that politics have changed a lot over the many decades since Kundera emerged on the scene; there's a lot of content in his acclaimed books that might not go over so well nowadays. That's not the issue here. This book is just boring, pointless, condescending, and short. You're done in one sitting and then left sitting there with a feeling of discomfort and unease. Meh. I've liked just about everything I've read from Kundera, and I didn't like this.

Enjoyed this book,a mixture of affection and wit, peppered with real objective, politics ! If you have not read Kundera then you should but read the story of his life and understand where he is co.omg from! Enjoy!

A lire!Je recommend!

Nothing to dislike

This recent book by Kundera was hard to put down. It is short and I savoured the absurdity of the narrative and style. This little gem is well worth adding to your Kundera collection.

Excelente libro de Milan Kundera! Me sacó las más insospechadas risas. Lo compré en inglés para practicar mi lectura y fortalecer mi comprensión del idioma inglés. Lo recomiendo ampliamente. El único detalle es que llego algo maltratado...