The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera review – funny and crisply elegant

In his first novel for 15 years, the inveterate ironist displays surprising sincerity as he celebrates the life that doesn’t signify anything 

Illustration: Clifford Harper/Agraphia.co.uk

Tessa Hadley

Wednesday 10 June 2015  The Guardian

There’s something very appealing in the flavour and personality of this new short novel of Kundera’s, the first for almost 15 years: it’s day-lit and funny and crisply elegant, with two passages of dream violence contributing their bass-note. Four men are brought into being in contemporary Paris, for the purposes of the writer: they are aware of him and call him their “master”, though it’s characteristic of Kundera’s light touch that the little meta-narrational joke is only aired once or twice, and you could easily miss it. The novel’s furniture is stylishly minimal: the statues of the queens of France in the Luxembourg Gardens, an exhibition of paintings by Chagall we never get inside, a bare room with one photograph on the wall and a bottle of armagnac, and a toy carriage painted red and yellow and drawn by two ponies, like something out of a very old children’s book. More takes place in public than in private spaces; some of the protagonists have wives and domesticities, but we don’t go there. The lack of clutter on the pages is almost sensuous.
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