The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera, tr Linda Asher (Faber, £14.99)
Born in 1929, the exiled Czech novelist Milan Kundera captivated western readers in the 1980s with playful tales of life under communism, shorn of conventional scene-setting and characterisation. The politics gave way to philosophy when he began writing in the tongue of his adopted France, the location for his new novel—as elegant as spun sugar, and about as nutritious. It cuts plotlessly between friends loafing around Paris. Alain eyes women in the park and has imaginary conversations with the mother who abandoned him as a boy. D’Ardelo fakes terminal illness while pursuing a widow. Charles plans a puppet show about Joseph Stalin and an out-of-work actor nicknamed Caliban (on account of his last role) speaks “Pakistani” to confuse people at parties.
The narrator forgets where certain events take place and says it’s irrelevant anyway; one character mentions Hegel because “our master who invented us once made us study him.” As familiar as this breeziness is the preoccupation with sex. We’re told the “seductive power” of “young girls” lies in the navel (it used to be “their thighs, their buttocks, or their breasts”). Charles advises D’Ardelo to be more boring; it “makes [women] incautious, and thus more easily accessible.”
Together with riffs about how no one understands a joke nowadays, Kundera’s title suggests this short book is more jester’s cap than capstone for a writer often tipped to win a Nobel Prize. Even so, his insistence on the virtue of triviality feels like special pleading for minor work.
Born in 1929, the exiled Czech novelist Milan Kundera captivated western readers in the 1980s with playful tales of life under communism, shorn of conventional scene-setting and characterisation. The politics gave way to philosophy when he began writing in the tongue of his adopted France, the location for his new novel—as elegant as spun sugar, and about as nutritious. It cuts plotlessly between friends loafing around Paris. Alain eyes women in the park and has imaginary conversations with the mother who abandoned him as a boy. D’Ardelo fakes terminal illness while pursuing a widow. Charles plans a puppet show about Joseph Stalin and an out-of-work actor nicknamed Caliban (on account of his last role) speaks “Pakistani” to confuse people at parties.
The narrator forgets where certain events take place and says it’s irrelevant anyway; one character mentions Hegel because “our master who invented us once made us study him.” As familiar as this breeziness is the preoccupation with sex. We’re told the “seductive power” of “young girls” lies in the navel (it used to be “their thighs, their buttocks, or their breasts”). Charles advises D’Ardelo to be more boring; it “makes [women] incautious, and thus more easily accessible.”
Together with riffs about how no one understands a joke nowadays, Kundera’s title suggests this short book is more jester’s cap than capstone for a writer often tipped to win a Nobel Prize. Even so, his insistence on the virtue of triviality feels like special pleading for minor work.
