Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera's newest book, The Festival of Insignificance, read to me like candy: sweet, easy, immediate. In the past, this short novel would have constituted a part, or section, of a longer work. But Kundera has aged now, and there's a sense that, at 86, he's publishing what he can, when he can, in a continued effort to probe the themes that have defined his career. 

In many ways, The Festival of Insignificance is quintessential Kundera. Themes include laughter, friendship, sexuality, and yes, communism. Kundera offers an unusual critique of the navel, for instance, identifying it as the new erotic zone - all the while, weaving a secondary narrative around Stalin and his Soviet subordinates. 

The novel isn't a perfect one - in large part because it doesn't feel complete. But there sections where there's lots to like. For my part, I've found - and continue to find - a certain comfort in Kundera's characters. They're props, after all: nothing more. And when reading Kundera, I don't have an issue with that: I recognize that his characters are masks for ideas, and what color hair they have is secondary, almost meaningless, when compared with the themes he uses them to explore. 

The title of Kundera's novel imparts a great deal, of course, about its contents, and it strikes me that The Festival of Insignificance is, in many ways, the natural end-point for his work. After all the laughter and forgetting, all the sexual discomfort and missed signals, it really does seem that what's left to Kundera and his characters is an element of insignificance. (Note: that's insignificance, not nihilism.)  

On several occasions, Kundera equates an acceptance of this insignificance with a "good mood" (those are his words). And while that might seem simple or reductive, I think, on some level, it's true. Kundera's characters knowingly tell lies, but those lies belie a greater truth: namely that insignificance offers a bridge to levity. In this new world, characters lie about insignificant events, they discuss insignificant relationships - and the result is happiness. 

The Festival of Insignificance is not my favorite of Kundera's novels - not by a long shot (that spot is reserved for The Joke). Still, reading Kundera is one of those rare literary experiences: one that's a mixture of pleasure and pain, sorrow and hope. I always feel refreshed - and optimistic - after reading Kundera's novels, if only because they reminds me to laugh.