La Fête de l’insignifiance Add a review

The Festival of Insignificance (French: La fête de l'insignifiance) is a novel by Milan Kundera. This is his eleventh and final fictional work before his death in 2023. It is about a man named Alain, who has not seen his mother since his childhood; Ramon, an intellectual who has retired; D'Ardelo, a man who has a narcissistic personality; Charles and "Caliban" are two people who operate a catering firm; and Quaquelique is an old man who remains attracted to women. Quaquelique manages to seduce women using his skill at non-stop talking. The novel is set in Paris. The themes include "the erotic potential; the link between mother and child; the procreative role of sex; angels...[,] navel gazing...and insignificance. The novels' characters discuss the philosophical ideas of Hegel, Kant and Schopenhauer. The novel is made up of seven parts (an approach he also used in his novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, among others, and representative of a structure he laid out in his book The Art of the Novel). The theme of insignificance was also used in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.