![]() ![]() 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. This, of course - the issue of meaning in the face of human vanity - has long been at the center of Kundera's work. 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." "Because of time, first we're alive - which is to say: indicted and convicted. "Time moves on," one of Kundera's characters tells us. 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. 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. ![]()
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