Slowness - Milan Kundera
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After the gravity of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, Slowness comes as a surprise: It is certainly Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, with, as the author himself says, not a single serious word in it ; then, too, it is the first of his novels to have been written in French (in the eyes of the French public, turning him definitively into a French writer ). Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than 200 years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. In the 18th-century narrative, the marvelous Madame de T. summons a young nobleman to her Chateau one evening and gives him an unforgettable lesson in the art of seduction and the pleasures of love. In the same Chateau at the end of the 20th century, a hapless young intellectual experiences a rather less successful night. Distracted by his desire to be the center of public attention at a convention of entomologists, Vincent loses the beautiful Julie -- ready and willing though she is to share an evening of intimacy and sexual pleasure with him -- and suffers the ridicule of his peers. A morning-after encounter between the two young men from different centuries brings the novel to a poignant close: Vincent has already obliterated the memory of his humiliation as he prepares to speed back to Paris on his motorcycle, while the young nobleman will lie back on the cushions of his carriage and relive the night before in the lingering pleasure of memory. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about dancers possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is merely a perpetual show emptied of every intimacy and every joy.
Irresistible. . . . Slowness is an ode to sensuous leisure, to the enjoyment of pleasure rather than just the search for it. --Cathleen Schine, Mirabella
Audacity, wit, and sheer brilliance. --New York Times Book Review
Paradoxically, Slowness. ..is the fastest paced of Kundera's novels as well as the most accessible. --Boston Globe
About the author (1996)
One of the foremost contemporary Czech writers, Kundera is a novelist, poet, and playwright. His play The Keeper of the Keys, produced in Czechoslovakia in 1962, has long been performed in a dozen countries. His first novel, The Joke (1967), is a biting satire on the political atmosphere in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. It tells the story of a young Communist whose life is ruined because of a minor indiscretion: writing a postcard to his girlfriend in which he mocks her political fervor.The Joke has been translated into a dozen languages and was made into a film, which Kundera wrote and directed. His novel Life Is Elsewhere won the 1973 Prix de Medicis for the best foreign novel. Kundera has been living in France since 1975. His books, for a long time suppressed in his native country, are once again published.The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), won him international fame and was a successful English-language film. In this work Kundera moves toward more universal and philosophically tinged themes, thus transforming himself from a political dissident into a writer of international significance.
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