Slender but weighty, thoroughly cerebral. . . . It comes as a welcome corrective to so much American-style realist fiction, which in heavy doses can blur into a kind of sameness. . . 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 GlobeFrom the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an unexpected and enchanting novelthe culmination of his life's work that is a hymn to friendship and an original and humorous commentary on our era and how we liveCasting 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 realismthats The Festival of Insignificance. Readers who know Milan Kunderas 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 authors wife, says to her husband: youve often told me you meant to write a book one day that would have not a single serious word in itI warn you: watch out. Your enemies are lying in wait.Now, far from watching out, 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.
