"Slender but weighty. . . . What is moving about this novel is its
embrace of what has always driven Kundera, the delicate state of living
between being and nothingness."-- Boston Globe
From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The
Unbearable Lightness of Being, an entertaining and enchanting novel--"a
fitting capstone on an extraordinary career." (Slate)
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."
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.
