Even before he left his native Czechoslovakia in 1975 and emigrated to France, there was always something French about Milan Kundera. Like the father of modern aphorists, the Duke de La Rochefoucauld (died 1680), Kundera took pleasure in distilling higher truths about mankind into pithy, proverb-like maxims. If La Rochefoucauld wrote that “passion makes idiots of the cleverest men, and makes the biggest idiots clever,” eroticism and its discontents similarly obsessed Kundera’s male characters. Thus, from the novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979): “Oh lovers! Be careful in those dangerous first days! Once you’ve brought breakfast in bed you’ll have to bring it forever, unless you want to be accused of lovelessness and betrayal.”
It is with reflections concerning the eroticism of the navel that The Festival of Insignificance begins. Alain, one of the novel’s characters, is prompted to such reflections on an afternoon in June while walking through the Luxembourg Gardens, where he is captivated, “even disturbed,” by the sight of young girls who “showed [their] naked navel between trousers belted very low and a T-shirt cut very short.” What does it mean, he asks, when erotic orientation no longer resides in the thighs, buttocks, or breasts of the female body?
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