Slowness

Slowness offers a lesson for these fast-paced times, where "time is money," multi-tasking is a talent, and couples must schedule time together for their sexual interludes. Published after his better-known novels The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, Milan Kundera's 1993 book, Slowness (La Lenteur), is more of a meditation on the effects of contemporary life and technology on memory and sensuality than a traditional novel. "Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared," Kundera (as narrator) considers as he tells two parallel tales of seduction separated by more than two-hundred years. Through multi-layered plot lines, Kundera (his wife Vera refers to him as "Milanku") visits a country chateau-turned-hotel, while a young, 18th-century French Chevalier also visits the same chateau for an unforgettable night of slow sensual pleasure with his mistress, Madame de T (described as a "Loveable lover of pleasure"). Meanwhile, Kundera's friend, Vincent, arrives at the hotel on his motorcycle, where he joylessly pursues a "quickie" with a girl he met in a bar. A "dancer" named Berck is so caught up in getting things done that he is unable to enjoy his life. The novel ends with a brilliant and unexpected plot twist, with the 18th-century nobleman having a "morning-after" encounter with his modern-day counterpart, Vincent. Ultimately, Slowness is about the modern desire to experience life quickly without the benefit of reflection. Kundera equates slowness to pleasure and remembering, and speed to vulgarity, forgetting, and failure. Slowness reveals Kundera's brilliant mind at work, and as its title suggests, Kundera's short novel is meant to be savored slowly. G. Merritt

Let this be only the first of Kundera's books you read. It was my first, and now I've read everything of his that has been translated into English and if there's more I'm willing to learn another language to get to it. This book is humorous, but that is the least of it. I've never read an author with such perception, such a wily mind. It's impossible to get his characters or their lives out of your mind. Reading Kundera makes life, other people, and the whole world make more sense. And less sense, at the same time.

This is the third of Milan Kundera's farces--succeeding "The Joke", and "The Farewell Party"--, and as a farce, and unlike its two predecessors, it doesn't quite come off; its climactic scene is too contrived. But like its two predecessors it has much more to offer than farce. It is short and light (in deliberate contradistinction to "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting", "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", and "Immortality"), almost a short story. I think if one encountered it within a collection of short fiction, one would be more likely to properly appreciate it. I don't recommend you make this your first Milan Kundera book, however. Start with "The Joke".

Let's set the record straight. I am astonished at Angeline Goreau of the New York Times Book Review and, more specifically, at Kirkus Reviews for their failure to come to grips with Kundera's simple but masterly little novel, 'Slowness'. Goreau , whilst she clearly seems to have become caught up in the spirit of the work to some extent, complains of missing 'the expansive feel of the earlier novels'. She is well within her rights to do so - there can be no disputing the fact that novels such as 'The Joke', 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being', and 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting' are far richer in their lingering sense of the voluptuousness of slowness. But Goreau's comment seems entirely to ignore both the need and the poetic appropriateness of the shift. 'Slowness' is a highly introspective novel - just like the characters that inhabit its pages it is continually looking inwards on itself. That it is short and sharp and inexorably entangled with its own runaway velocity is an essential reflection of the world, the author, and the narrator that produced it. Furthermore, Kundera's departure from his slower, lyrical works of magic must be understood as fully deliberate and entirely in line with his conceptions of the novel of the future - one fully endowed with what he refers to as 'architectonic clarity' (see 'The Art of the Novel'). The briefest of glances at Kundera's writings on writing also show Kirkus Reviews' assertion that 'Slowness' is a 'bleakly monitory novel' as a ridiculous oversight. Kundera has never intended for his novels to be didactic, he has merely striven to 'explore new possibilities of existence' and in this he has brilliantly and excitingly succeeded in the wonderful book that forms the subject of this review.

There is no one else quite like kundera. Indeed, even the president of iran, Khatami, is of this opinion. I concur. No other author can turn a perfectly ordinary phrase or event into a philospical discourse, and yet, keep it light, make it sprightly, and bring it to an open-ended conclusion. An oxy-moron? Not in Kundera's case. Its a study of speed and slowness, and the process of forgetting and remembering. a touch of sex (invariably with a dose of S & M), and mundane events. But what i find fascinating (more so than anything else) is that he doesnt tie up all the loose ends - stories go on, just as life does. there is no neat little ribon at the end, people are ordinary with limited views, mortal thoughts, and always, display a strong weakness of the flesh. The pathetic remain so: the inglorious acquire no immortality. His eye censors nothing in its translation to the written word.