Milan Kundera’s final novel is a slight book in the best and most suspicious sense: airy, comic, philosophical, and seemingly preoccupied.

It circles around a group of men in Paris as they drift through conversations, jokes, memories, erotic fixations, political ghosts, and small theatrical misunderstandings. Nothing much “happens,” which is partly the point. Kundera is interested in how insignificance might not be the opposite of meaning, but one of its more tolerable disguises.

This is late Kundera: lighter, stranger, more aphoristic, full of digressions about Stalin, mothers, desire, vanity, and the human talent for making metaphysical theatre out of absolutely bugger all. A compact, playful novel for readers interested in European literary fiction, philosophical comedy, and books that seem casual until they quietly remove a floorboard.

Faber paperback, 2016. Very good condition with light shelfwear.