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," an "opera buffa," 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 chbteau one evening and
gives him an unforgettable lesson in the art of seduction and the
pleasures of love.
In the same chbteau 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 thesecret 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"
