Interestingly, there is no plot in any of Milan Kundera’s stories. And the same goes for the new one. Even if there is one, the plot is there to serve an ancillary purpose: to support his ideas — his multifarious ideas — and philosophical notions about the futility of existence, about life and death, about the idiocy of politics, and about women. You only have to remain connected with those ideas to know what his new novel The Festival of Insignificance has to offer. Is it a novel? No, it’s a novella. And if you treat it like a monograph of his theses presented over the course of four decades, it will be a doubly delightful read.

Yes, it doesn’t have the tautness of narrative that Kundera’s admirers might have experienced while going through The Joke or The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. There is a reason for this: Kundera wants his readers to know that it is a kind of summation of what they have so far been reading. He is 86. He has all but reached the finishing line. He wants to go over the line without losing his breath. Don’t misunderstand: wait for his next book.

The Festival of Insignificance does not regurgitate old concepts. It rejuvenates them, reminding the reader how the Czech author (though he has been writing in French for the past four decades) has been subverting the established perceptions of power and eroticism. For him, the role that memory plays in our lives takes centre stage, discarding the heaviness that often weighs us down to become ‘serious’. Recall his famous line from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”. The Festival of Insignificance has five principle characters: Alain, Ramon, Charles, Caliban (friends) and D’Ardelo. Although they are woven into the story, they don’t substantially contribute to the plot, rather they move around the idea of birth, death and the meaninglessness in-between. The navel-gazing introductory scene in the beginning of the book has been picked up by almost every reviewer in the world, rightly so. However, most of them have failed to connect it to the haunting sceptre of death. Alain hasn’t come to terms with his birth which is why the navel “evokes in him the memory of his last encounter with his mother”.

Ramon, an aging academic, believes, or has come to believe, in insignificance. The reader gets to understand this at an early stage when he is discussing Alain with another friend Charles, suggesting “brilliance” as Alain’s biggest “stupidity”. This is the passage where he argues that brilliance challenges women to compete (apologies to my feminist friends). Charles, a caterer, has thought of penning a play. He has only thought of it, hasn’t written it down. Caliban, closer to Charles than other friends, is an actor who doesn’t have work. In the pivotal venue of the play, a party, he becomes a caterer with Charles, pretending to be a Pakistani. He doesn’t know what language is spoken in Pakistan, so he speaks nonsense most of the time. And then there is D’Ardelo, the one who sets the ball (the ball of ideas espoused by Kundera for a long, long time) rolling. He has just come from his doctor with a clean bill of health. And yet, something makes him lie to Ramon and he tells him that he has cancer. This is the juncture where insignificance assumes a festive garb.

Wait a moment. Is it possible that the communist past of Czechoslovakia is not referenced or alluded to in a Kundera story? No. Hence, the unmissable figure of Stalin, introduced in the second part of the book through Khrushchev’s memoirs from which Charles reads to Caliban from. Soon Stalin takes a back seat, almost overshadowed by his subordinate Mikhail Kalinin, “a man with no power” whose “swollen prostate often forced him to go piss”. My word, if that’s not a fascinating setup, then what is!

The thinness of the book can be off-putting. This is where readers have to be alert. Kundera gives a very strong clue as to what he is trying to say when he is actually telling readers about it. Just when Khrushchev’s memoirs come into the fray, Kundera as the narrator declares: “In my unbeliever’s dictionary, only one word is sacred: friendship”. That’s the vantage point from which the book should be read.

In his poignant essay ‘Enmity and Friendship’ published in the book Encounter (which every writer and reader should have a copy of) Kundera recounts his meeting with the French novelist Louis Aragon. He remembers how Aragon discussed only two things with him: the art of the novel and the poet Andre Breton, one of the founders of surrealism, with whom Aragon, a member of the Communist Party, had developed political and aesthetic differences. Concluding the essay Kundera writes: “In our time, people have learned to subordinate friendship to what’s called ‘convictions’. It does take a great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favour, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth. Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friendship is a virtue — perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.” The Festival of Insignificance is a celebration of this virtue.

D’Ardelo’s lie provides impetus to the lives of his friends and friends’ friends, for whom an impending death is as much a mystery as an uncelebrated birth, for whom one man’s unfulfilled creative life is just as painful when the woman he is hankering after leaves him for another man. But these are insignificances that bring the aspect of ‘relief’ to the show we call life.

The Festival of Insignificance

(NOVEL)

By Milan Kundera

Faber & Faber, UK

ISBN 978-0571316465

115pp.