The Festival of Insignificance

In a Paris park, four old friends meet and talk — and in their conversation, Kundera finds the perfect vehicle for a final meditation on the questions that have occupied him for six decades of writing: the nature of art, the comedy of existence, the relationship between gesture and meaning, the possibility that what we think matters does not, and that this might be not a tragedy but a liberation. The Festival of Insignificance is Kundera’s final novel, and at barely a hundred and twenty pages it is also his most concentrated: a work of playful philosophical comedy in which nothing much happens and everything is at stake.

The tone is different from everything that preceded it — lighter, more resigned, more amused — but the intelligence is unchanged, and the questions are the same questions he has always asked about what it means to be a human being living through history.

The perfect capstone to one of the great bodies of work in twentieth-century literature. Published by Faber & Faber.