The Festival of Insignificance

March 23, 2015
After over a decade away from writing novels, Kundera (Ignorance) returns with this slight lark about four laissez-faire Parisians. In the tradition of existential comedies, the drama is in the dialogue. The four characters—Alain, Ramon, Charles, and Caliban—spend their days in Paris’s gardens, museums, and cafes, chatting and philosophizing. During a daytime stroll in Luxembourg Garden, Ramon bumps into a former colleague who, lying about having cancer, asks for Ramon’s help planning his birthday/death party. Similar to Kundera’s previous novels, the book uses levity and humor to comprehend the lasting effects of horrors perpetrated during World War II, though it’s set in the present. Much time is spent debating disparate, seemingly random issues: Stalin’s decision to rename a German town Kaliningrad, a marionette play that Charles imagines, a fake language Caliban invents for dinner parties. Although events converge at the party, nothing much actually happens. The four friends’ conversations are frivolous yet weighty, leaping from idle musings to grandiose declarations—from the sexual worth of a woman’s navel to the nature of motherhood, from Schopenhauer’s relationship to Kant to Stalin’s conquest of Eastern Europe. This novel is a fitting bookend to Kundera’s long career intersecting the absurd and the moral. It is also an argument for more books like it: “We’ve known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world, nor reshape it, nor head off its dangerous headlong rush. There’s been only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously.”

January 1, 2015

Brief but undoubtedly potent, this new work by the immortal Kundera features four friends in contemporary Paris who encounter one another at parties and at the Luxembourg Gardens and talk, talk, talk (they're French, after all) about sex, history, art, politics, and the meaning of life. One obsesses on the exposed navels of fashionably dressed women passing by, another proposes that they acknowledge and celebrate their own insignificance. Along the way, self-importance--from Stalinist times until now--gets most darkly, amusingly drubbed. With a 100,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2015
Forgotten tyrants and blatant belly buttons have equally playful roles in this deceptively slight, whimsically thoughtful tale of a few men in Paris not doing or saying much. The sight of young women with exposed navels in the Luxembourg Gardens sets Alain to musing "on the different sources of feminine seductiveness." Not far away, Ramon avoids a Chagall show because of the long line. D'Ardelo, whose medical tests reveal he doesn't have cancer after all, nonetheless lies when he meets Ramon in the park and says he does. A man seduces a woman with banal remarks because brilliance challenges her to compete, "whereas insignificance sets her free." Stalin enters the narrative by way of a biography of Khrushchev given to Charles, who tells a visiting Ramon that "our master" provided it. The master is the narrator or author, whose intrusions resonate with Charles' desire to use the Khrushchev story in a marionette theater. The Stalin thread opens with a bad joke about his bagging 24 partridges on a hunt, a story derided by Khrushchev and others over the urinals they share. (Scholars may reference the latrine fouled by Stalin's son in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.) Charles, Ramon, and Alain discuss how the monstrous Stalin has faded from memory. But the narrative recalls an official named Kalinin, a "poor innocent puppet" in Stalin's government, who has a weak bladder. He and the tyrant reappear late in the book, shooting and urinating in the Luxembourg Gardens before driving off in a small carriage drawn by two ponies. Art, sex, disease, history, and friendship are lightly treated themes woven through scenes whose significance may be partly the disproving of a concern raised in Kundera's Ignorance, that "emigration causes artists to lose their creativity." But does the Czech-born writer who's lived in France for years truly believe, at age 86, that insignificance is "the essence of existence"? This strangely amusing novella has the power to inspire serious efforts to find significance in the very book in which it is so perversely denied.

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May 1, 2015
Readers concerned that Kundera's first new novel in 12 years would reveal a late-career departure from the playfully ironic existentialism that made him one of the twentieth century's most distinctive writers need not worry. The lauded Czech novelist, now in his mid-eighties, remains dedicated to exploring, as he once put it, the small number of themes that obsess me, define me, and, unfortunately, restrict me. Here, he sketches four friends in Paris who attend parties, drink wine, and meet each other amid the statuary of the Jardin du Luxembourg, all the while engaging in weightless and meandering intellectual banter about sex and history and Stalin and the meaning of it all. People make up fake languages and gaze at navels; a man pretends to be terminally ill for no good reason; a little feather floats beneath the ceiling. Stylistically and thematically, it's classic Kundera: polyphonic, Francophilic, digressive, intellectual yet antiphilosophical, deliberately strange, and aggressively light. And his descriptions are as beautiful as ever. Readers new to Kundera may wonder what all the fuss is about: this is, after all, an exceedingly short novel, without much plot or structure, that for its many nods toward topics of contemporary relevance seems mostly content to revel in amused detachment. But a perfect coda to a brilliant career.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)