As titles go, Milan Kundera’s latest novel, THE FESTIVAL OF INSIGNIFICANCE is right up there with his earlier tomes, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

It is quite literally a book about navel gazing. Alain, one of the quartet of central characters, and possibly the “author” of the story, ruminates on the eroticism of the belly-button and ponders whether seductive power no longer resides in thighs, buttocks or breasts, but in that small round hole located in the centre of the body.

Caliban, an actor who has taken the name of the character from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and pretends to speak Pakistani, has a reputation as an unfaithful husband who has an insatiable nostalgia for chastity.

Alain’s mother, who tried to commit suicide when she learned she was pregnant with him and then murdered the chap who tried to rescue her, rails against navel-less Eve and her miserable coitus: “Everyone jabbers about human rights. What a joke! Your existence isn’t founded on any right They don’t even allow you to end your life by your own choice, these defenders of human rights.”

“You don’t choose your sex, or the colour of your eyes, or your era on earth or your country or your mother. None of he things that matter. The rights a person can have involve only pointless things, for which there is no reason to fight, or to write great declarations.”

These are part of the myriad meditations, musings and meanderings of Milan, the Kundera conundrum as the curmudgeon who despairs at the navel gazing of eye glazing youth, who seems so uninterested in what happened before their own lifetime, Tweetnicks who have the attention span of a gnat.

Milan Kundera’s THE FESTIVAL OF INSIGNIFICANCE is a significant festival of laughter and not forgetting, written with a bearable lightness of being.

THE FESTIVAL OF INSIGNIFICANCE by Milan Kundera is published by Faber & Faber.