by DAVID L. ULIN
Author Milan Kundera PHOTO/Catherine Helie/Gallimard/Harper
There’s not much to Milan Kundera’s 10th novel, “The Festival of Insignificance” — his first work of fiction since 2000’s “Ignorance” — but then that’s part of the point. Revolving around five middle-aged friends living in Paris, it offers not a narrative so much as a collection of vignettes, or reflections: the novel as a set of asides.
“Time moves on,” one of Kundera’s characters tells us. “Because of time, first we’re alive — which is to say: indicted and convicted. Then we die, and for a few more years we live on in the people who knew us, but very soon there’s another change; the dead become the old dead, no one remembers them any longer and they vanish into the void; only a few of them, very, very rare ones, leave their names behind in people’s memories, but, lacking any authentic witnesses now, any actual recollection, they become marionettes.”
This, of course — the issue of meaning in the face of human vanity — has long been at the center of Kundera’s work. His first novel, “The Joke,” published in Czechoslovakia in 1967, describes in part the fallout from a satirical postcard (“OPTIMISM IS THE OPIUM OF THE PEOPLE!” it declares. “THE HEALTHY ATMOSPHERE STINKS! LONG LIVE TROTSKY!”) sent by a Czech student to a young woman he wishes to seduce: humor that cannot be read as humor, in other words.
A similar theme motivates “The Festival of Insignificance,” which also traffics in jokes, or more accurately, in our inability to respond to jokes anymore. “We’ve known for a long time that it was no longer possible to overturn this world nor reshape it, nor hold off its dangerous headlong rush,” a character named Ramon explains at a Paris cocktail party. “There’s only one possible resistance: to not take it seriously. But I think our jokes have lost their power.”
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