There’s something very appealing in the flavour and personality of this new short novel of Kundera’s, the first for almost 15 years: it’s day-lit and funny and crisply elegant, with two passages of dream violence contributing their bass-note. Four men are brought into being in contemporary Paris, for the purposes of the writer: they are aware of him and call him their “master”, though it’s characteristic of Kundera’s light touch that the little meta-narrational joke is only aired once or twice, and you could easily miss it. The novel’s furniture is stylishly minimal: the statues of the queens of France in the Luxembourg Gardens, an exhibition of paintings by Chagall we never get inside, a bare room with one photograph on the wall and a bottle of armagnac, and a toy carriage painted red and yellow and drawn by two ponies, like something out of a very old children’s book. More takes place in public than in private spaces; some of the protagonists have wives and domesticities, but we don’t go there. The lack of clutter on the pages is almost sensuous.

If our four men aren’t easy to distinguish as characters, then that’s part of the point. Ramon is in his 60s and retired, probably from teaching in a university; Charles is in his 40s and does catering for parties; Caliban is an actor who can’t find work; Alain, younger, is preoccupied with his mother, who abandoned him when he was a child. The four are friends and in Kundera’s “unbeliever’s dictionary”, he tells us, “only one word is sacred: ‘friendship’ ”. He means it, too – the last surprise of the inveterate ironist is his sincerity. When the men meet, they aren’t defined against one another; the writing draws attention instead to how porous and provisional their selves are. They’re somewhat alike, apart from the difference in their ages. And when they talk, their friends are actually listening; ideas and awareness really can be transmitted between certain individuals, rather than being sealed off behind the edges of their “character”, that romantic fallacy.

If the sharing can’t be complete – it’s one of the themes the men discuss – it’s mostly because our shared experience changes absolutely as time passes; we talk “each from an observatory standing in a different place in time”. Any crisis of incommunicability arises not from the isolation of the existential self, but out of history. When their master-author gives the characters for their edification a copy of The Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, a thick book “published in France a very, very long time ago”, it turns out that Alain’s 20-year-old girlfriend has never heard of Khrushchev – maybe “the name ‘Stalin’ was vaguely familiar”. The friends debate the significance of anecdotes from the memoir, and Stalin’s bullying Kalinin over his problems with his bladder. (Kalinin? Who remembers him?) Once-murderous stories change to reveal new meanings, become absurd, even comically touching – and perhaps will not be interpretable at all, for a next generation. As time passes, Roman says, lacking “authentic witness”, people and history can only be represented as marionettes. “No one has the right to pretend to be reconstructing a human life that no longer exists.”

The men are friends and the women are mostly absent and fairly terrifying. Alain’s girlfriend is never there when he rings, Ramon’s pick-up at a party goes off with someone else, the intimidating Mme Franck turns her husband’s death into an occasion for show-stopping displays of her own fortitude. Charles’s mother, it’s true, is an angel, surrounded by “suffering animals and aged peasants”: but then she’s dying and he’s bereft. Meanwhile, Alain imagines he’s in communication with his absconded mother, who never wanted him to be born. In extended dream sequences, he sees her trying to drown herself because she’s pregnant, drowning instead a young man who wants to rescue her; then he fantasises his own conception as an act of violence, his father’s will forcing itself upon his resisting mother. The remorseless, charged eroticism of Kundera’s earlier novels has been transmuted into a bruised male unease – or a poignant harmlessness, sometimes, or sly teasing. The statue queens preside over the pantomime finale, when a moustachioed huntsman-farceur, not unreminiscent of Stalin, makes a frightened old man who has been caught short “swear on his honour that he will never again piss on the great ladies of France”. Everyone laughs.

Perhaps the textures of the novel are thin, and perhaps it does seem to circle around some missing centre – of drive, or story. But then again, that’s part of the point: everything ends in Ramon’s hymn to insignificance, celebrating the life that doesn’t signify anything, the world that is just itself “in all its obviousness, all its innocence, in all its beauty”. And indeed this austere prose – with its elusive ironies, and aura of the 18th century – works beautifully, just as itself, in Linda Asher’s translation from the French.

• Tessa Hadley’s new novel The Past will be published in September. To order The Festival of Insignificance for £11.99 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.