Czech Communism collapsed 25 years ago. Kundera, who is 86, has lived in France for 40 years and written in French for more than two decades. The Festival of Insignificance—his first novel in 13 years—is an excellent opportunity to ask what happens to his fiction once the backdrop of Soviet oppression no longer throws his dark jokes, nihilism, and naughty interludes into bright relief. Is he doing no more than exercising his unconstrained imagination, vindicating his claim that he is not a political writer but a literary purist devoted to the freedom of aesthetic play? Or is he a dark prophet who, if you listen hard and carefully to the work, can be heard brooding aloud about the fate of a doomed Europe? The sense that Kundera is himself pondering these questions lends this playful puzzle an unexpected urgency.

The title is a joke on itself, and on the reader. It asks, the way The Little Book of Nothing might, “Why are you wasting your time reading me?” But just as making something out of nothing also describes what God and artists do, so Kundera’s title is a declaration of artistic purpose: for him the novel is the flower of European culture precisely because of its insignificance. In The Art of the Novel, translated from French to English in 1988, Kundera championed game-playing writers like Miguel de Cervantes and Laurence Sterne, slippery serpents who swallow their own tails and who gave birth to the modern masters Kundera most admires: Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch. He places his own work in the tradition of fiction that lives only in its mysterious unfolding and “winds up in a paradox.”

Yet for a writer in love with paradox, Kundera has powerfully prescriptive tendencies. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting—a novel that forms the backdrop of the present novel the way Communism once formed the backdrop of Laughter and Forgetting—Kundera taught his readers to be wary of children, angels, circle dancing, hope, nostalgia, and sentimentality. These are the emissaries of delusory optimism. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting also taught readers that there is a good sort of laughter—sardonic, irreverent, and mocking—and a bad sort, which is uncritical, joyful, and acquiescent. There is a lot of the bad sort in The Festival of Insignificance.

At the center of this brief novel are four friends who crisscross the Luxembourg Gardens, in Paris, in a succession of short chapters. One is an out-of-work actor called Caliban, so ignorant that he has never heard of Khrushchev. The eldest, Ramon, is a recently retired academic who knows a great deal but has embraced “insignificance” as a theory of life, renouncing all hope of meaning in the world. Alain is the mother-obsessed son of a woman who abandoned him when he was a baby. Charles is a philosophically minded caterer who is writing a play—but only in his head.