What the critics thought of: Milan Kundera’s The Festival of Insignificance, Stephen Witt’s How Music Got Free and James Rhodes’s Instrumental
The new – and quite possibly last – novel from the 86-year-old Milan Kundera, named with characteristic ponderousness The Festival of Insignificance, had critics of a certain age all aflutter. “Kundera was a gateway drug for me, my initiation into the world of serious literature,” gushed Alex Preston in the Observer. “I took to walking around with [The Unbearable Lightness of Being] sticking out of my blazer pocket … There is always the hope that a writer you love might produce a late flourish.” Alas, his high hopes were disappointed. “It is only 128 pages long, but shows so little interest in providing the reader with reasons to continue turning the pages that the reading process becomes a pitched battle between hope and boredom, with the latter crushingly victorious,” he wrote, before unceremoniously pronouncing the book “a stinker”. Theo Tait, in the Sunday Times, delivered a similar verdict, albeit with a more subtle barb: “It is possible that Kundera’s embrace of insignificance is a little too wholehearted.” Only John Sutherland, in the Times, commended the novel as a “beautifully composed work”.
In contrast, How Music Got Free, Stephen Witt’s account of the rise of illegal file-sharing and the subsequent demise of the global music industry, was received enthusiastically across the board. Writing in the Sunday Times, Nick Hornby described it as “a terrific, timely, informative book, of particular value to anyone who has been left bewildered by the speed of change in listening habits in the 21st century. Witt is an authoritative, enthusiastic, sure-footed guide, and his research and his storytelling are exemplary.” In the New Statesman, Bob Stanley commended Witt as “engaging even on the tech side of the story, in which he could easily have become bogged down in lab speak. This never happens, because Witt is concise and very funny with it.” For Andy Gill in the Independent, however, “it’s a sad irony that what will surely be the year’s most important music book contains little actual discussion of music, as opposed to business and technology. Which is a reflection of the way that … all digital media are now increasingly led by the medium rather than the content.”
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