Milan Kundera The Festival of Insignificance

A charming summer read. Having been  a great fan of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "the Book of Laughter and Forgetting", I was delighted to see a new novella by Milan Kundera.  I thought the best thing about Chezoslavakia opening, was that we got Kundera's work in translation! There is also "The Joke" and "Life is elsewhere"

 This is as the Washington Post correspondent says, "An entertaining divertissement, a lightly comic fiction blending Gallic theorizing(Kant, Hegel) and Russian Style Absurdity."   Yes, those were his influences...the charm is that he does the unexpected...when you think you know, he reverses it...and therein is the humor and wit. We know what is what, but we play the game. The greatest revelation is one Robert Frost made: the poetry and significance in life is in the every day; open your eyes and see it!  Witness it. 

Kundera  weaves Stalin and a story of hunters and his men, including Kruschev, with a love story...that is not a love story...of a womanizer, of a friend who is not a friend but who he befriends, and so on..and inserts meditations on philosophical ideas about the life.  It is a novella, that I could not put down and finished  in a day...on the road and at home.  Highly recommend it.  Very relaxing, and probably what a novel should be. People have forgotten what a joke is so they cannot recognize it.  It is serious but there is not a serious note in it...sound familiar? The reality of the contemporary world avoiding realism.  I will leave it there.  I do not know how to follow  this read. What can I read next?    Product Details

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