THE FESTIVAL OF INSIGNIFICANCE
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 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."
Now, far from watching out, 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
Milan Kundera is a Czech writer who went into exile in France in 1975, becoming a naturalised French citizen in 1981. Kundera's Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, his Czech citizenship conferred in 2019. He "sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in book stores".
Edad recomendada: Adultos.
KUNDERA MILAN
Milan Kundera, nacido en Brno, Checoslovaquia, era estudiante cuando se instauró el régimen comunista checo en 1948 y posteriormente trabajó como obrero, músico de jazz y profesor en el Instituto de Estudios Cinematográficos Avanzados de Praga. Tras la invasión rusa de agosto de 1968, sus libros fueron prohibidos. En 1975, él y su esposa se establecieron en Francia, y en 1981 obtuvo la nacionalidad francesa. Es autor de las novelas La broma, La vida está en otra parte, Vals de despedida, El libro de la risa y el olvido, La insoportable levedad del ser e Inmortalidad, así como del libro de relatos Amores risibles, todas ellas escritas originalmente en checo. Sus novelas más recientes, Lentitud, Identidad e Ignorancia, así como sus obras de no ficción El arte de la novela y Testamentos traicionados, fueron escritas originalmente en francés.
