Before these, we have a triptych of serio-comic novels – The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere and Farewell Waltz – vividly evoking the milieu of postwar and communist-era Czechosolovakia without staking out a claim to the formal originality that would become Kundera’s hallmark.
Why did those books seem so urgent, so indispensable at the time? Was it because they coincided fleetingly with the zeitgeist, or do they embody something more robust and enduring? How will history judge them? His reputation will rest, it seems fair to say, on the three great “middle period” novels: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality.
A glance at the back covers of Kundera’s novels in the Faber editions reveals a raft of quotes from the likes of Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Carlos Fuentes, most of them more than 30 years old, reminding us that his reputation was at its zenith in the 1980s, the decade when everbody was reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It is an old man’s book and, while there are flickering signs of a mellow and playful wisdom, it would be surprising if there were not something autumnal about it. The Festival of Insignificance, then, is certainly typical Kundera, if not classic Kundera. Second, the lofty reach of that theory, which homes in on “the centre of female seductive power” as perceived not just by “a man” but “an era”: testifying to the ambition of a novelist who has made it his life’s work to forge connections between the individual consciousness and the shifting currents of history and politics.
Who else could the writer of this passage be than Milan Kundera? Two of the main tropes of his novels are present and correct, in the first page and a half: first of all, the primacy of the male gaze, fixed on the female body, “captivated” by it, and spinning an elaborate theory on the basis of what it sees there. We don’t know his age, or what he looks like, but we know that he is an intellectual because the sight of the exposed navels of the young women he passes in the street inspires him to a series of reflections, each one an attempt to “describe and define the particularity” of different “erotic orientations”. O n the first page of Milan Kundera’s new novel published in France last year when its author was 85 a man is walking down a Parisian street in June, just as “the morning sun was emerging from the clouds”.
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