Slowness

Boston Globe

New York Times Book Review

Dwight Garner

Milan Kundera's slim new novel, Slowness, is his first work of fiction written originally in French, and it's a surprise -- a fey, funny, somewhat frazzled novel that lacks the depth of his earlier work but may be his most purely entertaining to date. The narrator of Slowness simultaneously relates two quirky love stories -- one is set in the 18th century, one in the 20th -- that take place in the same chateau where he and his wife happen to be staying. Kundera, as always, supplies some fine writing about romance's dark heart ("For a man there is no balm more soothing," the rueful narrator observes, "than the sadness he has caused a woman.")

But this book's truest pleasures lie not in these complicated and underdeveloped tales. Far more enthralling are the narrator's tart and lovely observations about other aspects of life, notably the way society has become too fast and frantic (hence the book's title). "There is a secret bond," Kundera writes, "between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting." Kundera also finds time to discourse amiably on fame and hedonism, and he amusingly skewers the posturing of France's public intellectuals, men he calls "dancers," who rush to perform their kind of "moral judo" in front of television cameras.

Slowness isn't major Kundera. But readers will feel a familiar emotional tug when the narrator begins to talk about the importance of reclaiming moral seriousness -- albeit a Kunderian seriousness that's always balanced by "clear and reliable" pleasures: "a gulp of cool water, a look at the sky. . . a caress." -- Salon

LA Times

Kirkus Reviews

Kundera is nothing if not a theoretical writer, and he is here concerned with the contrast between older and newer ways of thinking and feeling—specifically with the now devalued ideal of hedonism in a culture whose embrace of "speed" as the measure of all things denies us the possibility of having experiences at leisure and recollecting them in tranquility (or, as his unnamed narrator complains, "Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?"). The idea is explored in two contrasting stories, each of which is embellished by discursive commentary. One, set in 18th-century France, and bearing acknowledged resemblances to Pierre Cholderos de Laclos's classic Les Liaisons dangereuses, recounts the amorous education given a delighted young nobleman by his relaxed, worldly-wise mistress. The other, set in the same locale (then a "country chateau," now a hotel), describes the comical interactions of a group of intellectuals gathered for an entomological conference and variously involved with one another. Memorable participants include a would-be libertine whose bad habit of thinking prevents him from having sex, a woman filmmaker whose romantic unhappiness locks her into two mutually abusive relationships, and a Czech scientist whose pride in his dissident political status takes the curious ancillary form of a very nearly neurotic worship of the body. They're all riddled with a self- defeating tendency to second-guess their own spontaneous impulses—unhappy avatars of this bleakly monitory novel's declaration that "When things happen too fast nobody can be certain about anything . . . not even about himself."

Dependably inventive and amusing, especially in its delicious sensitivity to the convolutions of contemporary self-consciousness, the novel is nevertheless overly argumentative and ever so slightly preening, brief as it is. Not vintage Kundera.