Short, Surreal, Great Fun, and... Insignificant? 
 A brief review of a very brief book by Milan Kundera. Brief because although I enjoyed it greatly, I have absolutely no idea what it is all about. This is not at all the Kundera of 
 The Unbearable Lightness of Being 
 , the only other book of his that I have read. The Soviet power that in 1968 had brutally crushed the Prague Spring in that earlier novel is a thing of the past. The author has moved to Paris and become a literary boulevardier, writing now in French. Stalin makes a posthumous appearance as a jokester shooting the noses off statues in the Luxembourg Gardens. The sight of so many young women walking the Paris sidewalks with navels bared gives rise to philosophical reflections that may mean much--or little more than erotic fantasy. 
 Confused yet? Take a look at some of the chapter headings: "The Marionette Theater," "They Are All in Search of a Good Mood," "A Little Feather Floats Beneath the Ceiling." Individual subsections are titled too, every other page or so: "The Twenty-Four Partridges," "The Toilet Revolt," "The Next Time They Meet, Charles Gives His Friends a Lecture on Kalinin and the Capital of Prussia." If those sound odd, imagine two friends who work as waiters in cocktail parties communicating entirely in made-up languages. Or a man haunted by spectral but friendly conversations with his long-departed mother, who tried to drown herself rather than give birth to him. 
 Have I conveyed the flavor? No? Then try it for yourself; it is scarcely more than an hour's reading and is bound at least to entertain. And do drop me a comment if you work out what it all means!