Audio only
Length2h 33m
About this audiobook
“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.”— Boston Globe
From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an entertaining and enchanting novel—"a fitting capstone on an extraordinary career." (Slate)
Casting 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 The Festival of Insignificance. 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 Immortality, Goethe and Hemingway stroll through several chapters together talking and laughing. And in Slowness, 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.”
Kundera 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.
Audiobook details
GenreGeneral Fiction, Literary Classics
Length2 hrs 33 mins
Narrated byRichmond Hoxie
FormatAudiobook
Publish dateJun 23, 2015
LanguageEnglish
More from Milan Kundera
EncounterMilan Kundera4h 21m$20 · $0.00
ImmortalityMilan Kundera11h 54m$29 · $0.00
The Art of the NovelMilan Kundera4h 31m$20 · $0.00
Life Is ElsewhereMilan Kundera, Aaron Asher10h 19m$29 · $0.00
Farewell WaltzMilan Kundera7h 16m$24 · $0.00
The Book of Laughter and ForgettingMilan Kundera8h 20m$26 · $0.00
Laughable LovesMilan Kundera7h 3m$24 · $0.00
89 Words followed by Prague, A Disappearing PoemMilan Kundera2h 7m$16 · $0.00
Testaments BetrayedMilan Kundera7h 37m$26 · $0.00
A Kidnapped WestMilan Kundera1h 25m$16 · $0.00
SlownessMilan Kundera3h 26m$18 · $0.00
The CurtainMilan Kundera4h 40m$20 · $0.00
Jacques and His MasterMilan Kundera1h 53m$16 · $0.00
The Unbearable Lightness of BeingMilan Kundera9h 36m$29 · $0.00
IgnoranceMilan Kundera4h 20m$20 · $0.00
IdentityMilan Kundera3h 53m$20 · $0.00
The JokeMilan Kundera11h 44m$29 · $0.00
The Complete Works of Jane Austen (Unabridged)Jane Austen88h 8m5 (1)$1 · $0.00
Desperate MeasuresBrenda Jackson8h 59m$28 · $0.00
Shōgun, Part TwoJames Clavell29h 16m$40
Showdown in the Big EasyCharles Tillman, Michael Anderle, Martha Carr7h 37m$23
Searching For ThanksgivingS.E. Smith4h 24m$20
Naughty 4Brenda Hampton7h 30m$17
The Dance with Me TrilogyShelley Shepard Gray21h 44m$35
The DopemanJaQuavis Coleman5h 25m$20
Sherlock Holmes: The Ultimate CollectionArthur Conan Doyle59h 49m$5 · $0.00
My Favorite Husband, Vol. 1Hollywood 360, CBS Radio5h 40m$14
WhistlerAnn Patchett10h 45m4 (3)$29 · $0.00
Grand Opening 2Carl Weber9h 16m$20
Sons of Valor II: Violence of ActionBrian Andrews, Jeffrey Wilson12h 34m$23
Malevolent MagicMildred Abbott7h 13m$17
Look TwiceEva Hudson9h 48m$20
The Complete Novels of Lucy Maud MontgomeryLucy Maud Montgomery203h 59m$1 · $0.00
Bikes, Toys, and Hot BoyzGenesis Woods, Shantaé13h 9m$23
The Natchez Burning TrilogyGreg Iles96h 18m$53 · $0.00
War LordBernard Cornwell13h 21m$33 · $0.00
Ghetto BastardK’wan7h 37m$20
L. M. Montgomery – Premium Collection: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry & MemoirsLucy Maud Montgomery155h 55m$2 · $0.00
MARK TWAIN: 12 Novels, 195 Short Stories, Autobiography, 10 Travel Books, 160+ Essays & Speeches (Illustrated)Mark Twain416h 24m5 (1)$2 · $0.00
The Great Gatsby: Original 1925 Edition (An F. Scott Fitzgerald Classic NovelFrancis Scott Fitzgerald4h 45m$18 · $0.00
Louisa May Alcott: 16 Novels in One Volume (Illustrated Edition)Louisa May Alcott141h 35m$2 · $0.00
The Fire Next TimeJames Baldwin2h 25m$15
The Complete Works of Oscar WildeOscar Wilde80h 38m$1 · $0.00
The Complete Books of F. Scott Fitzgerald (all his 5 novels + all 4 short story collections published during his lifetime)F. Scott Fitzgerald86h 48m$2 · $0.00
The Count of Monte Cristo + The Three Musketeers + The Man in the Iron Mask (3 Unabridged Classics)Alexandre Dumas100h 13m$2 · $0.00
Braving the TruthRachel Held Evans11h 31m$29 · $0.00
Richard Wagamese SelectedRichard Wagamese3h 14m$15
Shōgun, Part OneJames Clavell24h 19m$35
Henry V (The Play, Historical Background and Analysis of the Character in the Play)William Shakespeare, William Hazlitt8h 40m$1 · $0.00
Pathways to LightPrakash Amte7h 6m$8
The North American Indian (Illustrated Edition)Edward S. Curtis, Frederick Webb Hodge6h$2 · $0.00
The Complete Novels of Leo Tolstoy in One Premium Edition (World Classics Series)Leo Tolstoy213h 41m$2 · $0.00
The Holy BibleKing James99h 50m$12 · $0.00
The Complete Novels of the Brontë Sisters (8 Novels: Jane Eyre, Shirley, Villette, The Professor, Emma, Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall)Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Anne Brontë118h 9m$2 · $0.00
The Greatest Works of Jules VerneJules Verne247h 39m$2 · $0.00
The Complete Works of G. K. ChestertonG. K. Chesterton421h 4m$2 · $0.00
Time RegainedMarcel Proust15h 54m$2 · $0.00
You may also like
Over the Fireside with Silent FriendsRichard King4h 18m$1 · $0.00
The Black Monk, and Other StoriesAnton Pavlovich Chekhov8h 25m$1 · $0.00
Tristram ShandyLaurence Sterne21h 8m$1 · $0.00
Farther AwayJonathan Franzen8h 42m$26 · $0.00
These Precious DaysAnn Patchett11h 14m$29 · $0.00
Essays in IdlenessAgnes Repplier$1 · $0.00
To the LighthouseVirginia Woolf8h 42m$2 · $0.00
More to SayAnn Beattie7h 56m$20
Virginia Woolf: The Complete WorksVirginia Woolf314h 29m$1 · $0.00
The Second Thoughts of an Idle FellowJerome K. Jerome6h 48m$2.30
The SwimmerJohn Cheever26m$7 · $0.00
What Is Man? And Other StoriesMark Twain10h 28m$2.30
Man in ProfileThomas Kunkel11h 21m$23 · $0.00
Every Mother Is a DaughterPerri Klass, Sheila Solomon Klass10h 50m$21 · $0.00
If I MayA. A. Milne4h 47m$2.30
LamentsJan Kochanowski1h 12m$1 · $0.00
A Century of English EssaysThomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Wordsworth, Joseph Addison, William Caxton, Hilaire Belloc, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Jonathan Swift, William Hazlitt, Edmund Gosse, Alice Meynell, Richard Jefferies, Augustine Birrell, William Makepeace Thackeray, Edward Thomas, Geoffrey Chaucer, Alexander Pope, Austin Dobson, Francis Bacon, W. B. Yeats, G. K. Chesterton, Richard Steele, Grace Rhys20h 33m$2 · $0.00
The Captain's Death Bed, and other EssaysVirginia Woolf7h 41m$2 · $0.00
The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in PessimismArthur Schopenhauer$1 · $0.00
The Garden Party, and Other StoriesKatherine Mansfield7h 27m$1 · $0.00