The Festival of Insignificance: A Novel
Written by Milan Kundera
Narrated by Richmond Hoxie
3/5
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About this audiobook
“Slender but weighty. . . . 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 Globe
From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an entertaining and enchanting novel—"a fitting capstone on an extraordinary career." (Slate)
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 completely avoiding realism—that’s The Festival of Insignificance. Readers who know Milan Kundera’s 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 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.”
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.
Milan Kundera
The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929 - 2023) was born in Brno and lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves—all originally in Czech. His later novels, Slowness, Identity, Ignorance, and The Festival of Insignificance, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.
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Reviews for The Festival of Insignificance
20 ratings11 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera is a recommended, short novel about five friends and the inconsequentiality of life.
Alain, Ramon, D'Ardelo, Charles, and Caliban are friends living in Paris. While Alain obsesses over the exposed navels of young women as the new erotic/seductive zone, Ramon is strolling through the park and meets D'Ardelo who lies about having cancer and then says he wants to plan a party, using Charles to plan it and Caliban to help. There is also much discussion of Stalin.
The tile of the novel really describes it and will tell you if it is a good selection for you. It really is a novel about nothing. The book is very short, more of a novella, has no story, and very little character development. After I first read it, I had to pause before writing a review. Honestly, I didn't like the characters, and didn't see a point to the novel. The Washington Post review noted that to the unsympathetic, "The Festival of Insignificance will come across as simply inconsequential and pretentious." But then I went back to the title and pondered Kundera's thoughts some more.
Ramon tells us that, "Insignificance is the essence of existence." Moreover, Ramon insists that insignificance will set a person free, require no presence of mind, no vigilance. So we have it established that Kundera is giving us permission to just experience his novel for what it is without looking for an overriding theme or great point. It must also be noted that The Festival of Insignificance is also humorous and celebrates the absurd at times. There are keen bits of startling insight embedded within the musing and antics of these men, such as the theory about "observation posts standing each on a different point in history, from which people talk together unable to understand one another." The discussion becomes in reality two monologues. It is a novel about irrelevance, detachment, insignificance, and, yes, it is a memorial, a festival, to insignificance.
Disclosure: I received an advanced reading copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes. - Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Is not a good book, I did not enjoy the story despite a few sentences in around 10 pages max. There is nothing to say about it... As the title says... Insignificant.. 115 pages of basically nothing
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Not to everyone's taste (no plot, a meandering story, characters weaving in and out, much musing on philosophical and cultural issues with a very light touch), but I must admit I loved "hearing" Kundera's narrative voice again after years of not having read him. It is not one of his best (or most "significant") books, but, for me, well worth reading.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Festival of Insignificance, Milan Kundera, performed by Richmond Hoxie, translated from the French, by Linda Asher.This strange and brief little book is about a short time in the lives of a group of friends, Alain, Ramon, Charles and Caliban, as they plan a cocktail party for another friend, D’Ardelo, who has told them he is dying of Cancer. Each of the characters has his own particular issues to deal with which reveal themselves as the scenes evolve. At one point, I thought perhaps the tale was actually, in the end, a performance of a play, but instead, it was each character playing his own part, deciding on his own role.Alain, was abandoned by his mother. He imagines conversations with her. Ramon is dealing with aging. He is also dealing with a mother who is about to abandon him, by dying, Charles gives Caliban work as a waiter and encourages his fantasies and performances. Caliban pretends to be Pakistani to fulfill his need to act, since he is currently unemployed. Alain contemplates the idea of a woman’s navel becoming the new seat of eroticism, and yet, it is not the seat of birth and the continuation of life. D’ardelo is pretending to be dying because a man who recently passed away was getting all the attention. A widow grieves briefly and is congratulated for her ability to love live so much that she can recover so quickly from her loss and go on, attending parties, even with eyes red from crying. It is a spoof on life, I think, and although the author says existence is insignificant, ironically, each of the characters seeks to make his own existence worthy of notice, in some way, and in essence, with the talk of sex, sickness, angels, sorrow, and surviving as best as one can, under whatever circumstances one finds oneself, it seemed to be more profound than it pretended to be. There seemed to be many incongruous explanations and tales, but they really concerned themselves with significant subjects like life and death, success and failure, good health and illness. The stories about Stalin had greater hidden meaning, Alain’s fantasies about his missing mother were thought provoking. Who was the boy she drowned? Was it Alain? Can he make peace with her memory? The conversations between two characters, each speaking in a language not understood by the other, were humorous but also poignant because they were both so needy that the sound of the sympathy in their voices was enough to sustain them. The irony is that the insignificant was truly very significant. All of the characters seemed a bit detached from reality which is probably why they were searching for ways to achieve happiness and contentment, to find meaning for their very existence, because we all pass through life briefly, pass out of everyone’s memory eventually, and leave no lasting mark unless we find a way to make our moment in time the essence of significance.The narrator provided a perfectly nuanced interpretation of the book, using just the right amount of emphasis for each situation to make its meaning clear.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The festival of insignificance by Milan Kundera and Linda Asher Four friends talk about all things around their lives, serious things along with things like do angels have navels.Love parts about Hemingway and other authors.I received this book from National Library Service for my BARD (Braille Audio Reading Device).
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera. His first novel in thirteen years is a flimsy novella appropriately titled because it is indeed insignificant.It takes place in Paris where friends exhibit a proclivity for jokes, pranks, lies and assorted other choices. A waiter who speaks no Pakistani pretends to speak Pakistani a language he doesn't know and he communicates with a friend speaking a language that she doesn't know. It is all absurd and there is no need to read the book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is my first Milan Kundera, though I've heard about him for a while. I found it curious, sort of transparent and vignette-like writing, with an easygoing manner of a casual story teller. Human traits and frailties are explored with enviable frankness and humor. And there are even surprise appearances of Stalin, Krushchev and Kalinin in the narrative.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5While perhaps not as deeply reflective as some of his earlier works, The Festival of Insignificance is a fascinating consideration about the banality of many aspects of humanity and touches upon themes of meaningfulness, friendship, sex, and death. This is a short read but I highly recommend it for any fan of Kundera who wants to be transfixed by his poetic prose and destruction and remodeling of the mundane.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A philosophy book disguised as fiction. That isn't a complaint, just an observation. I appreciated the message that Kundera was trying to purvey, but the story itself lacked a clear plot and the characters were not well developed. It is difficult to really develop one character, let alone multiple characters in approximately 100 pages. All that being said, I did enjoy this read, but despite it's short length, it was not that quick of a read. I found myself having to reread several passages, and then wanting to rereading other passages. The pace ebbed and flowed for me. I don't know that this book would be everyone's cup of tea, but I would recommend giving it a chance.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/54.5 stars
Brilliant, and full of 'significance'. It is always a joy to read Kundera. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I read a lot of Kundera in my 20s, but it has been many years since I read any of his major works. Like his other recent novels this one is a miniature - a distillation of his style that is a little cryptic but always charming and entertaining. On the surface not much happens - a group of friends observe, analyse and converse, but some of the details are fascinating - for example the theory that Stalin renamed the Prussian capital Königsberg (Kant's city) as Kaliningrad (after one of his least distinguished henchmen) as a joke and an expression of perverse will. I suspect much of the philosophical content went over my head. If I have a criticism it is that Kundera does not allow his female characters much space. If this is a swansong, it is quite a strong and memorable one, but we can hope there is still more to come.