The festival of insignificance

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The festival of insignificance (original title: La Fête de l'insignifiance ) is a novel by the Czech writer Milan Kundera in French . It was published in 2014 by Éditions Gallimard . The German translation by Uli Aumüller was published by Carl Hanser Verlag the following year .

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Todd Scofield as Caliban in a Folger Theater production
Stalin turns a long nose

Four old friends stroll through Paris , reflect on life and meet in changing constellations. There is Alain, who was abandoned by his mother as a child and tries to come to terms with her in imaginary scenes and dialogues. He philosophizes about the displayed belly buttons of young women and what it says to make them an erotic symbol. There's Charles organizing parties and creating a fictional puppet show while his mother is dying. There is Ramon, who wants to visit a Chagall exhibition, but cannot bring himself to join the long line in front of the Musée du Luxembourg . And finally there is Caliban, who is called after his star role in Shakespeare's The Tempest . Meanwhile, the unemployed actor makes his way as a waitress at Charles' events, where he makes fun of playing a Pakistani who doesn't understand a word of French.

All four friends meet at the birthday party of D'Ardelos, a former colleague of Ramons. After suspected cancer, D'Ardelo planned the festival as a simultaneous celebration of his distant birth and near death. Intoxicated by the pity he received, D'Ardelo sticks to the wrong diagnosis after the medical all-clear. But his courtship for the beautiful widow La Franck remains unfulfilled even on his birthday. Quaquelique's courtship, whose secret is its inconspicuousness, is much more successful. Tired of the brilliant and strenuous attempts at conquest by men like D'Ardelo, women can indulge in the insignificant Quaquelique. So through his mere presence at D'Ardelo's festival he also wins Julie, who is Ramon's unfulfilled enthusiasm. In contrast, Charles and Caliban, who broke the heart of the Portuguese housemaid Mariana, meet after the party at Alain's for a bottle of Armagnac .

Charles's anecdotes about Stalin run through the novel , such as the passionate hunter's claim that one day he shot 24 partridges in a row at the same spot , interrupted only by a kilometer-long march for replacement ammunition. The entire leadership of the Soviet Union , above all Khrushchev , was secretly indignant about Stalin's boasting without realizing that he was just kidding. Charles sees the episode as a symbol of the prevailing lack of humor. He also considers the renaming of Kant's hometown Königsberg to Kaliningrad to be a joke , since the namesake Mikhail Kalinin distinguished himself primarily through urinary incontinence , because of which he regularly wet himself in Stalin's long speeches and thus won the pity of the otherwise pitiless dictator. At the end of the novel, in the presence of the action, Stalin and Kalinin frolic through the Jardin du Luxembourg and shoot the statue of Maria de 'Medicis in the nose. Ramon, on the other hand, philosophizes about the insignificance in which he discovers the essence of human existence, but also the key to a good mood.

reception

The Festival of Insignificance was Kundera's first novel in 14 years to meet high public expectations. In Italy, where the novel first appeared, the initial circulation was 100,000 copies. In France, sales figures and critics' praise are equally great. One of the most prominent critics is Imre Kertész , who sharply attacked Kundera's novel in his diary novel L'Ultime Auberge : “All the familiar platitudes, but with French eloquence”.

In Germany too, the novel placed on the bestseller list of the mirror in the area Hardcover / Fiction, the highest ranked 11 in March 2015. That same month, the novel came 7th in the SWR leaderboard . The reception in the German-language feature pages was very divided. Andreas Breitenstein describes the novel as a “cramped work of old age” and a “book of rigidity”, in which Kundera is no longer aesthetically up to its own test arrangement. For Judith von Sternburg, The Festival of Insignificance is “an old man's book in a way that is as touching as it is annoying”. Volker Weidermann thinks the book is “boring, lifeless, thought-out and empty”, the alleged lightness is “heavy”. Andreas Kilb only discovers a "collection of discarded novel ideas" with which Kundera drives "pointless jokes". For him, the long-time candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature survived not only his fame, but also his talent with the book.

Joseph Hanimann other hand feels from The Feast of insignificance positively to Kundera's best-selling novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being reminded, "as if there after thirty years gepustet one about it again, so that fly up clouds of dust and sit wonderfully slow." For Gregor Dotzauer is the novel "bursting at the seams" and "a single digression", but at the same time "a single pleasure". Hellmuth Karasek finds his balance between seriousness and irony "funny to howl and tragic to laugh". Ulrich Greiner reads a "magically cheerful and at the same time profound novel" in which Kundera meets the lack of humor with humor and the need for reckoning with smiling wisdom. Jörg Magenau considers the novel full of “gentle humor” to be “irrelevant in the best sense of the word” and, against the background of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, “medicine against the acute seriousness of terror”. For Stephan Wackwitz , Kundera's “short, comical, sad, beautiful late work” is “a late, comforting endgame”.

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Andreas Kilb : Die, you savior of my life . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from February 25, 2015.
  2. ↑ a b Gregor Dotzauer : The acid test . In: Der Tagesspiegel from February 22, 2015.
  3. ↑ The Festival of Insignificance ( Memento of the original from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on book report .  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.buchreport.de
  4. ↑ SWR best list March 2015 at Südwestrundfunk (pdf).
  5. ↑ Review notes on The Festival of Insignificance at perlentaucher.de .
  6. ^ Andreas Breitenstein: Book of Rigidity . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from February 22, 2015.
  7. ↑ Judith von Sternburg: Stalin, the nice old man with the schnauzer . In: Frankfurter Rundschau of February 22, 2015.
  8. ↑ Volker Weidermann : This lightness weighs tons . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of March 2, 2015.
  9. ↑ Joseph Hanimann: The secret of the belly button . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of February 23, 2015.
  10. ↑ Hellmuth Karasek : The unbearable laughability of history . In: Die Welt from February 23, 2015.
  11. ↑ Ulrich Greiner : At the navel of the angels . In: The time of March 11, 2015.
  12. ^ Jörg Magenau : Medicine against acute seriousness . In: Deutschlandradio Kultur from March 14, 2015.
  13. ↑ Stephan Wackwitz : Life goes on even without meaning . In: the daily newspaper of March 21, 2015.