{"product_id":"the-festival-of-insignificance-9780062356901","title":"The Festival of Insignificance","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\"Slender but weighty. . . . What is moving about this novel is its embrace of what has always driven Kundera, the delicate state of living between being and nothingness.\"-- \u003cem\u003eBoston Globe\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFrom the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of \u003cem\u003eThe Unbearable Lightness of Being, \u003c\/em\u003ean entertaining and enchanting novel--\"a fitting capstone on an extraordinary career.\" (\u003cem\u003eSlate\u003c\/em\u003e)\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCasting light on the most serious of problems and at the same time saying not one serious sentence; being fascinated by the reality of the contemporary world and at the same time completely avoiding realism--that's \u003cem\u003eThe Festival of Insignificance\u003c\/em\u003e. Readers who know Milan Kundera's earlier books know that the wish to incorporate an element of the \"unserious\" in a novel is not at all unexpected of him. In \u003cem\u003eImmortality\u003c\/em\u003e, Goethe and Hemingway stroll through several chapters together talking and laughing. And in \u003cem\u003eSlowness\u003c\/em\u003e, Vera, the author's wife, says to her husband: \"you've often told me you meant to write a book one day that would have not a single serious word in it...I warn you: watch out. Your enemies are lying in wait.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eKundera is finally and fully realizing his old aesthetic dream in this novel that we could easily view as a summation of his whole work. A strange sort of summation. Strange sort of epilogue. Strange sort of laughter, inspired by our time, which is comical because it has lost all sense of humor. What more can we say? Nothing. Just read.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eKundera, Milan:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e - \u003cp\u003eMilan Kundera is the author of the novels \u003cem\u003eThe Joke, Farewell Waltz, Life Is Elsewhere, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being\u003c\/em\u003e, and \u003cem\u003eImmortality\u003c\/em\u003e, and the short-story collection \u003cem\u003eLaughable Loves\u003c\/em\u003e--all originally written in Czech. His most recent novels \u003cem\u003eSlowness, Identity, and Ignorance\u003c\/em\u003e, as well as his nonfiction works \u003cem\u003eThe Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, \u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eEncounter\u003c\/em\u003e, were originally written in French.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Harper Perennial","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50655311921426,"sku":"9780062356901","price":10.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_635998b9-0877-460e-9768-0680366188b8.jpg?v=1733378978","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/the-festival-of-insignificance-9780062356901","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}