Only Milan Kundera could title what is likely to be his final book The Festival of Insignificance. At 86 he's lost none of his delight in subverting expectations, and rather than deliver a work of testamentary grandeur, he has decided to sign off with something strange and slight. His first novel after a 13-year hiatus stretches to just over 100 pages, and the only thing it seems to take seriously is living up to its title.The Festival of Insignificance is a work so bizarre and angular that, despite its brevity, it defies straightforward summary. At times the dialogue is so contrived, or Kundera is so openly manipulative, that it verges on the unreadable - then suddenly it beguiles you with its very oddness.The novel takes place in Paris and flits between four friends - Alain, Caliban, Charles and Ramon - as they indulge in some intellectual speculation and attend a party. There is also someone called D'Ardelo who has just received the all-clear after a cancer scare but then lies about it. And there is a chap called, preposterously, Quaquelique, who seduces women through his very insignificance.Kundera was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1929. He was still a boy when the Germans occupied the country, and after World War 2 he became an ardent communist and an even more ardent poet. He initially welcomed the 1948 communist coup and wrote some unabashedly propagandistic poems. He was expelled from the party in 1950 (the basis for The Joke), then readmitted in 1956. By the 1960s he was an important figure in the liberalisation movement that culminated in the Prague Spring of 1968.The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) brought extravagant commercial reward as it became a bestseller.Kundera's philosophy of literature drew heavily on Flaubert's ideas about the effacement of the author, and in the aftermath of The Unbearable Lightness of Being Kundera felt he had taken an "overdose of myself". He stopped giving interviews and withdrew from public life.Accusations that Kundera was trying to conceal things in his past took a nightmarish turn in 2008 when Czech magazine Respekt claimed he was a police informer in 1950. His career, from the mid-1980s, has been defined by the contrast between the privacy he has demanded as an individual and the control he has sought to exert as an author.If The Festival of Insignificance responds in any way to the revelations of 2008, it is only in his ostentatious display of control over his invented world. He never lets us forget who runs the show. The characters refer to the author as "our master". If a marionette play is being staged, it is clear who is pulling the strings. - © The Daily TelegraphThe Festival of Insignificance by Milan Kundera, published by Faber & Faber..