The Festival of Insignificance

The last novel by the international superstar and author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 'Kundera is the saddest, funniest, and most lovable of authors.' Times An artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere.' Salman Rushdie 'Kundera designs fictions of the highest order.' Ian McEwan 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 avoiding realism - that's The Festival of Insignificance. In Kundera's earlier novel, 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.' Far from watching out, Kundera finally and fully realises his old aesthetic dream in a novel that we could view as a summation of his whole work. A strange sort of summation. Strange sort of epilogue. Strange sort of laughter, inspired by our era, which is comical because it has lost all sense of humor. What more can we say of Kundera's last novel? Nothing. Just read.

The French-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in the Czech Republic and has lived in France since 1975. He died in Paris in 2023.