Sign-In
Cart
The Festival of Insignificance
Paperback
HumorGeneral FictionLiterary Fiction
ISBN13: 9780062356901
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: Jun 14 2016
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.20
Height: 0.30 Width: 5.30 Depth: 7.90
Language: English
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.
Also in
Literary Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales Vol. 1 (Loa #26): The Pioneers / The Last of the Mohicans / The Prairie
Cooper, James Fenimore
Hardcover
The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, Volume I: American Tabloid, the Cold Six Thousand; Introduction by Thomas Mallon
Ellroy, James
Hardcover
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk
St Aubyn, Edward
Paperback