The Significance of Insignificance

The order of reading all these Milan Kundera books has largely been determined on the basis of 'short books first'. It's hard to resist the idea of knocking off 115 pages in short order as against 350. Thus the late arrival, The Festival of Insignificance, has been a bit of a queue-jumper.

Kundera is still with us at 94 and this, first published in France in 2014, appeared when he was 85 but he's lost none of his erotic fixation.

Wikipedia tells us he,

"sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be studied as French literature and classified as such in book stores"

and he wouldn't be the first to identify with the literature of a country other than his first one. I'm not sure how far T.S. Eliot's work augmented his adopted English, royalist sympathies but Martin Amis surely fancied himself as American. Julian Barnes might be better suited by being French. Some countries are more fashionable than others, France apparently more than most. Samuel Beckett had a penchant, as it were, for France, too. Auden, for a lot of readers, was less successful as an American if that's what he thought he was doing post-1939.

I'm sure you can provide more examples of your own. Italy was glamorous in Shakespeare's time and still is. He set more plays there than he had to.

--

Virgin Media have managed to restore the e-mail to working order. In 4 days, not the two that the message from Axel Wehrle, Director of Customer Service, claims. 

Facts don't stand in the way of political or corporate pronouncements. The other day, a Conservative hysteric on Times Radio tried to frighten listeners with the idea that Diane Abbott would be Chancellor of the Exchequer in a Keir Starmer government.

No, said the presenter, that would be Rachel Reeves.

Even Corbyn wouldn't have made her Chancellor.

 

I have been drawn into an olde worlde urban legend that Stanley Matthews didn't play at Fratton Park because he got no change out of Portsmouth's full back. I only raised objections because I did once hear the same story from some other club.

I did a bit of research and found Matthews on team sheets for Fratton Park fixtures from 1948-53, with one exception. And that is where such theories start.

Ah, no Matthews today. He don't like it down here. 

But maybe it was the game before that that he was injured.

 

Which is a long way from Virgin Media preferring to put it their way but people do go to great lengths to believe that which they prefer to believe. Virgin births, Liz Truss economics, somebody else wrote Shakespeare and that there are starmen waiting in the sky, they'd like to come and meet us but they think they'd blow our minds.

Which they would, they absolutely would. And what would we do. Try to shoot them down, most likely, determined to defend our right to ignorance, our precious, independent point of view, come what may.

 

I really should move on from Virgin Media after 25 years of paying their bills. I'm sure they're awful but, I'm paralysed by liking what I'm used to however much a month more than it should do it costs me.

In The Festival of Insignificance, Kundera does what most writers seem to do in old age and becomes even more like himself than he was already. We reduce ourselves to our essentials and become a summary, a precis, of what we were.

Kundera, in his fixation on post-Existential chic, does much with that transient, elusive insignificance of those things that don't mean much but are all that there is and so mean everything and,from such paradoxes, all kinds of wisdom can be made to look as if they have appeared, like apparitions.

The Festival of Insignificance finishes on page 115 having started on page 3. It is in seven parts and each part has a title page with a blank page to follow with some parts not having got as far as the verso, the left-hand page, so that's about 20 pages with no writing on. Page 36 is one of the fullest, with 30 lines of about 10 words each.

At most, then, it's 95 pages of 300 words, which makes 28500 words but it won't be anything like that.

Writers refine themselves out of existence, if they have any sense. Why apply oneself to such drudgery if one can reduce the workload to something more like that of a poet.

 

I have, intrepidly, re-opened the file of the last idea for a novel that I had which was abandoned, inevitably, last year. But not having to aim for 50 thousand words in order to qualify as a novel, maybe I'll just write what I have and see what happens. All I want is a 'novel' I'm happy with.

It has a new working title, Paradise, which would hardly have distilled my idea of art if it wasn't ironic.

We will see.