Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Shakespeare all have a role in literary showman Czech-born, Paris-based Milan Kundera’s first novel in 13 years. It is a mellow, very French confection best described as a frolicsome meditation, full of charm and gaiety, lightly served on a discreet bed of sadness.
There is wit and playfulness as well as the customary Kundera sexism. Never a man to hang around – and for all the wry humour, an urgency is lurking – Kundera begins with Alain whose thoughts on a Parisian June morning focus on the erotic allure of the female navel. On sighting one at close quarters in a city apparently full of bare midriffs on display, he is “captivated; captivated and even disturbed”.
Cue Leopold Bloom who may well be nudging Alain with tentative speculations as to the true physical appeal of womankind whose seductive power “no longer resided in their thighs, their buttocks, or even their breasts, but in that small round hole located at the centre of the body.”
It may sound trivial – and it does – but Kundera, having always been committed to his admittedly erotic philosophy of life, is obviously taking on the universe in general, as conventional narrative has never much interested him, at least not much once he wrote The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) a relatively straightforward tale about a young doctor caught between two very different women in repressed, post-1968 Czechoslovakia. That novel, first published in French, then in the original Czech a year later, made him internationally famous. But even then, Kundera was already looking beyond convention. For him, it is life, the metaphysical realities and the details that make up life, which are important.
About the same time as Alain is contemplating the female body, another of Kundera’s four main, lightly-drawn characters – all friends, all male – is introduced.
“Ramon was approaching the museum at the edge of the Luxembourg Gardens, where for the past month Chagall paintings were on exhibit.”
He wants to see them but does not have the patience required for queuing. The Joycean methodology is sustained. Kundera’s Paris enjoys a fleeting variation of Joyce’s Dublin while the narrative, particularly in the many sequences of offbeat dialogue, almost immediately establishes itself as a French movie enfolding scene by scene under the gleeful direction of Kundera.
With a snap of his fingers he beckons a peripheral player, D’Ardelo, who prior to his retirement a year earlier used to work with Ramon. As he is on his way to receive medical test results, D’Ardelo is gloomy. Whatever about ageing he is now facing the possibility of death too. But the news is good. As he walks home he encounters Ramon. Their conversation is a triumph of adroit observation. D’Ardelo, intoxicated with relief, passes on some interesting gossip about a newly bereaved femme fatale, announces his intention of throwing a party, and then, to his own bewilderment, voices a blatant lie.
As D’Ardelo takes his leave “he raised a hand in a sign of farewell, and this diffident, nearly shy gesture had an unexpected charm that touched Ramon”.
Two things are interesting here; firstly the use of the word "farewell". This novel reads like a leave taking, the final act of a career begun in Czech and continued and ultimately concluded in French. But more intriguingly it reprises one of the most beautiful moments in Kundera's oeuvre which, for all its appeal, has invariably succeeded more by interludes within works rather than by sustained narrative. The moment recalled is one which occurs in one of his finest works, Immortality (1991), which he wrote in Czech. That beguiling novel-within-several-novels begins with the retrieval of a simple gesture. An elderly woman turns and smiles girlishly at the young instructor at the end of her swimming lesson.
“Her arm rose with bewitching ease. It was as if she were playfully tossing a brightly coloured ball to her lover.”
Fiction for Kundera resides in recalling gestures. He sees it as an elegant series of thoughtful reflections on life, love and memory. His preferred territory is quasi-philosophical; he can be irritatingly clever and self-indulgent but such is his conversational fluency, his ease and pleasure in the random observations made, the facts discovered, that he is seldom boring and is invariably engaging. It is quite a gift.
Intellectual perambulation
Laughter, being, forgetfulness, memory and increasingly, throughout the intellectual perambulation of
The Festival of Insignificance
, longing are his specialist themes. One of the four friends, Charles, longs to make sense of his relationship with his mother while a young girl similarly longs to make a connection with a waiter, who is actually an out-of-work actor, nicknamed Caliban, who amuses himself by speaking an invented form of Pakistani. Her frustration is believable and touching.
Siberian Andrei Makine, who fled Russia and, in common with Kundera, also writes in French, has retained a political edge in his writings. Kundera's politics are far more oblique. One of the difficulties in being fully convinced by The Festival of Insignificance, or at least in seeing it as a major book, which for all the inventive indolence it is not, is that Kundera's last book, Ignorance (2002) was so impressive. It looks at a number of lives, the dreams and fears of which are exposed with a humanity readers may not usually associate with Kundera the ringmaster, who delights in openly pushing his characters about like puppets.
The difference between these two most recent works is that in Ignorance, Kundera makes effective use of his characters simply not knowing. He also injects astute reflections on the notion of homeland as paradise or hell, "with all its emotional power bound up with the relative brevity of our life, which allows us too little time to become attached to some other country, to other countries, to other languages".
Kundera turned 86 on April Fool's Day, a birthday Beckett, an influence, would have envied. In the aftermath of the Russian invasion in August 1968, Kundera's books were banned in his country. In 1975 he and his wife settled in France and by 1981 he had become a French citizen. The title of an early work, Life is Elsewhere, which was published in French in 1973, explains a great deal. Kundera was already writing in French, while still writing in Czech, although there is no Czech version of Life is Elsewhere. It is very funny, a genuine comic novel in which an ambitious young poet takes on life, literature, romanticism and just about everything else. More than 40 years have since passed and Kundera's humour is now more kindly.
There are a number of running gags in the new book, one of which involves Stalin and his not-so-merry men. There is also a suicide disrupted by a rescuer which is described with satiric blackness. Kundera also intervenes. “You’ve never read Hegel?” asks Ramon of Caliban . . “You don’t even know who he is. But our master who invented us once made me study him” and Ramon explains that Hegel pointed out that true humour is “inconceivable without an infinite good mood”. Kundera is clearly feeling benign here, happy at becoming a Prospero figure in this slight, little farewell tempest all of his making; it’s very French, rather knowing and expectedly seriously “unserious” as was his stated intention.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent
