The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera’s last novel, Ignorance, was published in 2000. Over a decade later, it’s no stretch to call The Festival of Insignificance one of the world’s most anticipated novels from one of the greatest living novelists. Many will delight at Kundera’s playful title, its dash recalling the tragi-comic titles of his classic middle-period such as The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, breaking from the solemn single-word titles that characterise his later work (Immortality, Slowness, Identity). Already topping sales lists in Italy, Spain and France, this novel has commentators again speculating on the author’s chances for the Nobel Prize.

What a pleasure it is to return to Kundera-world, where, enthralled by the bravura of minimal gestures, I can think of no other writer who can do so much with so little. At 115 pages the work is no hostage to its brevity: Kundera is a master of references, where a few lines of prose immediately conjure expansive histories, philosophies, narratives and moods. The structure of this short novel relies on the allegorical, but for all the condensation and compression, the work is always vital, animated by Kundera’s facility for the comic. ‘My dear friend, I lack only one thing: a good mood,’ Ramon informs his friend, Caliban. Invoking Hegel, Ramon continues that, ‘only from the heights of a good mood can you observe below you the eternal stupidity of men, and laugh about it.’

Accordingly, Festival navigates multiple terrains of absurdity, drawing Stalin eavesdropping by a urinal alongside a philosophical reflection on the tenderness of friendship, with some audaciously literal navel-gazing to boot. Funny, intelligent, engaging on every level, Kundera’s elegant little meta-fiction brings his oeuvre into the post-millennial age. Nobel or no, The Festival of Insignificance reminds us that Kundera’s work is extraordinary, delivering an inimitable understanding of modern times that will be read well into the future.


Lucy Van is a freelance reviewer.