Unbearable lightness

The Festival of Insignificance. By Milan Kundera. Translated by Linda Asher. Harper; 115 pages; $23.99. Faber & Faber; £14.99.

MILAN KUNDERA has a philosopher’s roving mind and a storyteller’s smooth tongue. The Czech writer has lived in France since 1975 and has produced 11 works of fiction, all of which play deftly with themes of mortality, love, meaning and totalitarianism. His most famous, “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”, about lovers in Prague, came out in 1984 and won him the most acclaim. He has not published a novel for 14 years, but his name is often whispered as a contender for the Nobel prize in literature.

The “Festival of Insignificance”, his new novella, came out in France last year, and has now been translated into English. It tells the story of four male friends in Paris and their personal musings. Eroticism takes centre stage, as it often does in Mr Kundera’s work. The book begins with Alain, a Frenchman walking through the city, preoccupied by women’s titillating belly buttons. It is an image that recurs throughout this short book, which is broken into “scenes” with chapter headings that...

from The Economist: Books and arts http://ift.tt/1QresO7