The Festival of Insignificance

Description

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. Review: Short but still good. - The latest and probably the last novel of Milan Kundera is a very short work at just 130 pages. Though admittedly not upto the quality of The Unbearable or Immortality, the book is still easily recognisable for a fan of his work. His ability to take up the most trivial of human affairs and use it brilliantly illuminate our modern condition stands out. Non-fans may want to wait for a cheaper paperback edition, but a diehard Kundera fan like me can hardly wait. There's not another writer in this world I would pay 600 bucks to read 130 pages of. Review: Existence and Insignificance - After months of having sat sedately on my shelf, the book finally found its way into my December reading list. It was refreshing to read a book by Milan Kundera after almost a year or so. Like all his other books, this book encompasses Kundera’s wisdom and profound thoughts that percolate the little/grand events of our lives. Having introduced his heroes, Kundera sets out to explore the questions of eroticism, meanings, representations, history, relationships, and choices one makes in life. In a span of hundred pages, he lets his characters unravel themselves through introspection, lies, jokes, sickness, theatre and story-telling. In this book, Kundera artfully searches for the meaning of existence, to locate what it means to exist. He makes the reader question- Is existence the grand truths of our lives? Is existence the wider reality we share with each other? What is this existence? Where does it lie? Can we ever understand existence while existing in this reality? Or is it a festival we celebrate?