Celebrating meaninglessness

La fête de l'insignifiance

"Meaninglessness, my friend, is the essence of existence."
Questioning the meaning of life and reaping the beauty of everyday life, "A Celebration of Meaninglessness" is Milan Kundera's latest novel after a decade-long hiatus from writing novels. It is the author's "unexpected summary of all his works. A strange summary. A strange ending." The whole novel is like a comedy, a farce, with the Luxembourg Gardens in the Latin Quarter of Paris as the stage. Four good friends, Alain, Ramon, Charles, and Caliban, take turns on stage. Following their footsteps, their life stories, and their conversations in groups, the story introduces young girls on the streets of Paris, the Chagall exhibition that is popular among the citizens, the jokes of Twenty-Four Partridges, a kind-hearted person who needs to urinate urgently, a mother who attempts suicide and turns to murder, a noisy cocktail party, and angels who have fallen from heaven... Scenes of crazy and abnormal human comedy are played out on the stage.
★ "The Celebration of Meaninglessness" can be said to be Kundera's last novel, and it is the writer's "unexpected summary of all his works. A strange summary. A strange ending."
★ "Celebrating the Meaninglessness" is short but concise, fragmented and philosophical. It is a condensed version of Kundera's novels, using a light and subtle style to satirize various aspects of the world: glamour and filth, big figures and small roles, reality and dreams, seriousness and absurdity, greatness and insignificance, history and forgetting, life and death... questioning of personal growth history, jokes about love affairs, and exploration of cultural conflicts.

2023-02-01

上海译文出版社

118

9787532789924