The Festival of Insignificance - Milan Kundera

The essence of Kundera in telegraphic form.  As he gets older, his books become almost crystalline reflections of the essences of the themes he has explored through his entire oeuvre.  One sentence, one detail about a character will call up a whole chain of characters, ideas, comments from his other longer early novels.  One comment on a young woman can summarize all his reflections and views on the modern age.  All of it built around his usual structures:  older men, younger women; sons and mothers; the undercurrents between friends and loose acquaintances...
This idea of insignificance seems like some kind of final position on his long exploration of the history of modern European/Western culture.  In earlier books he bemoans the loss of all this nuance, reflection, interplay of idea and the world;  in this book his seems resigned, maybe even finding a freedom in this realization of insignificance?

There is a funny sequence that returns through the book, where he brings in Stalin and his cronies.  The idea around these sequences is the philosophical idea of the relationship between reality and our representation or perception of it.  There are two possible positions:  one, we cannot know reality, only our perceptions, but these personal representations have some kind of relationship to the real; two, we have only our representations and there is no underlying real (or it is completely unknowable).  Kundera seems to see Stalin (and other total autocratic regimes afloat on a world of propaganda and ideology) as definitive proof of the second position.  Reality is unknowable, individual, and a strong individual can force everyone to accept their representation, whatever the individual's personal experience might be.  Some relationship to the trap of language here and the relationship between language and perception...

Another great passage:  "... I've wanted to talk to you about something.  About the value of insignificance... Insignificance, my friend, is the essence of existence.  It is all around us, and everywhere and always.  It is present even when no one wants to see it:  in horror, in bloody battles, in the worst disasters.  It often takes courage to acknowledge it in such dramatic situations, and to call it by name.  But it is not only a matter of acknowledging it, we must love insignificance, we must learn to love it... my friend, inhale this insignificance that's all around us, it is the key to wisdom, it is the key to a good mood..."  p113