Slowness

Rating:
Summary: In Praise of Slowness
Review:
Ironically, Slowness is a brisk read. The book is 156 pages long, and it could easily be read in one or two sittings. I, however, took my time, impelled, in part, by the theme of the book-slowwwnesss. And yes, the book can be enjoyed at a slow pace-that is until you hit the latter 100 pages, when the plot turns into a farce, and the prose reads so easily, so joyfully really, that you cannot help but finish quickly.

As always with Kundera novels many specific lines struck me, and I commemorated them with dog-eared pages. One quote seemed to be lifted from another Kundera novel, Immortality. In Slowness Kundera writes, "...beyond their practical function, all gestures have a meaning that exceeds the intention of those who make them. When people in bathing suits fling themselves into the water, it is joy itself that shows in the gesture, notwithstanding any sadness the divers may actually feel."

Kundera is talking abut Immaculata, a character who has just jumped into a pool fully clothed, but he could just as easily be talking about Agnes, the heroine of Immortality: "the essence of her charm, revealed itself for a second in that gesture and dazzled me."

Reading Immortality, you sense Kundera's compassion for Agnes; reading Slowness, with Immaculata, and the various other characters, you sense Kundera's contempt (although this may be too strong a word: in Kundera's terms, most of the characters here aren't even deserving of contempt.)

But Kundera does show compassion for several characters from an 18th century novel, characters who seem to embody the ancient idea of slowness-an idea all but lost to the modern characters of Slowness, all of who seem to be caught up in various fiascos. (These fiascos culminate in a ridiculous scene at the side of a swimming pool in a château.)

I read the book during the course of several mornings, and then I finished the last 100 pages in one sitting, in the evening. It is a good book for Kundera fans, although I am not sure I can agree with the critics line, quoted on the front cover of the book: "audacity, wit, and sheer brilliance." What does Kundera have to do to earn some mediocre praise?


Rating:
Summary: A short, fun, insightful novel
Review: A bit lighter than standard Kundera fare, both in word count and in tone, but in Slowness fans of Kundera's more traditional work will find much of what they expect: quirky protagonists, a blurred line between novelist-narrator-character, and Kundera's usual existentialist meditations.

The pace of life (slowness vs. haste) is the primary theme this time around, and to explore this idea Kundera tells the story of two seductions that are separated by two hundred years. In the present we have all the features of modern society (media, communication, technology) that keep us so focused on the destination that we forget about the journey. In the past we have the vagabonds of yesteryear who with their easy indolence symbolized the leisurely pace of their era.

Sex, as always, offers an opportunity for an interesting analogy. The present-day narrator discusses an woman who mentions the word "orgasm" forty seven times in a lecture about sex, reducing the physical act of sex to "...an obstacle to be got past a quickly as possible in order to reach an ecstatic explosion..." Several passages later, the 18th century lady who is a character in the parallel tale practices seduction as the "...art of staying as long as possible in a state of arousal."

There is lots of silly stuff too. Irreverent characters, comical situations, politics, and at one point the narrator has a discussion with a character's penis. Other reviewers have accused Kundera of laughing at us in this novel, and while I can understand how one might come to this conclusion I don't agree. I found the novel to be entertaining and, occasionally, insightful. And at 132 pages you'll get through the whole book in a sitting or two.

Rating:
Summary: A Marvelous Book to Read and Savor Very Very Slowly
Review: A lovely small novel: tender, witty, intelligent and laugh-out-loud funny in places. Kundera not only watches and listens to us, he really sees us and sees through us, as individuals and as segments of society. A book to put in your suitcase and leave there, to pick up and read from occasionally. Great fun!

Rating:
Summary: Slowness
Review: Another wonderful book! Kundera explores the direct correlation between Slowness & Memory; or Speed & Forgetting.

In the 21st Century in the advanced economic nations, personal democracy may or may not be a an all-time high. Feminism, high wages for high skills, increased multiculturalism, etc. The counter argument to this is the speed of modern society is infringing upon memory/happiness.

Rating:
Summary: Pleasures of Slowness
Review: I suppose it would be a mistake to describe this slim volume as a fast read. If the book is shorter and in some ways lighter than Kundera's other novels, one imagines that Kundera expects the reader to linger that much longer with it anyway. Like his other novels, this one is heavy with ideas, often at the expense of character or plot, but like his other novels the range of those ideas is dazzling. The writing is irresistible, funny, provoking, and unexpected. A pleasure, like every bit of Kundera I've read. (And I'm coming to this after having read, and enjoyed, several of his books; it's impossible for me to say, but I can understand the argument that first-time Kundera readers are better off starting with, for example, the Unbearable Lightness of Being.) The primary elements include a Kundera-ish narrator off to a chateau getaway with his wife; a meditation on an 18th century novella about a brief affair; a low-profile Paris intellectual and his café cronies; a high-profile intellectual who is perhaps less an intellectual than a publicity hound; and a meeting of entomologists. Among the ideas explored are the need for an invisible audience, the meaning of hedonism, the politician as "dancer," the Sublime Planetary Historic News Event, and, of course, the beauty - the lost beauty, as Kundera sees it -- of slowness. A great read, fast or slow or in between.

Rating:
Summary: Not up to usual Kundera standards
Review: Let me begin by saying that this is not a bad book. In fact, if it were written by an unknown, nameless author I might find it rather brilliant. However, when compared with other Kundera works, this one falls, saddly, short. It lacks the self propultion of his other books. In addition, the sweet meloncholy of his other characters is missing in this text. All in all, this book is worth reading. However, if this is your first encounter with Kundera,I would recommend reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being, or Ignorance first.

Rating:
Summary: An entirely unique author.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Another Side of Kundera
Review: Not the usual style of Kundera's writing, a lighter path of writing, many mixed stories and characters that demonstrate the brilliance of Kundera.

It shows the different levels of people in the society, what attracts them and what standards each one maintains and tries to inspire in others around him. How people get hooked on few things in their heads, and many of their actions just depend on who is around them to notice them, and what image they would be transmitting.

Very interesting stories that keep you wondering, and the style of Kundera shocks you many times just by being very detailed oriented and open in his expressions and thoughts.

Rating:
Summary: Undisputedly original, with an erratic charm of its own...
Review: Same place (an old castle), different times, interlinked stories of lovers, Kundera himself, and a multitude of carefully described peripheral characters that somehow complete the story behind the stories. All that, in a book of merely 176 pages...

However, there is much more to "Slowness", because the real protagonist of this short novel is time, and its nature. Kundera makes some interesting observations that are quite true, from my point of view. He points out the connection between slowness and pleasure on the one hand, and slowness and memory on the other. It is fairly evident that he wants to make us think about the dangers of the speed that seems to characterize our modern society. Where are we headed?. And is it worth the price we will have to pay?.

Is this book for everybody?. Certainly not: there are some scenes with sexual content that are inappropriate for very young readers, and that older readers might find distasteful. Despite that, I believe that many people will like "Slowness", mainly due to the fact that the novel is undisputedly original, with an erratic charm all of its own. The story wanders from one character to the other and from our days to the distant past with an almost perfect inconsistency that hides an omnipresent connecting factor: time.

All in all, I think that those who are fond of the strikingly unusual will enormously enjoy this book, but only if they are able to pay little attention to the defects in "Slowness" in order to concentrate on what makes it worth reading.

Belen Alcat

Rating:
Summary: A book that somehow loses its bearing....
Review: The gist of the Slowness story can be told in maybe a couple chapters. Most of the content has nothing to do directly with the main plot, but outrageous digression and meditation on the philosophy of pleasure. It's a meditation of pleasure, or rather, the endangerment of pleasure of slowness. The entire book circuits around the question Milan Kundera addresses toward the very beginning: what happens to the pleasure of slowness? Immediately one can conceive the substantial emphasis, connotation, implications, and gestures on sexual (carnal, bodily, physical) pleasure.

Two stories run parallel over a vast interval of time at an identical location, some chateau in Prague. In late 18th century, Madame de T. summoned a young nobleman to her chateau as a screen of her secret lover Marquis from her husband. Madame de T. seduced the young man and lasciviously obliged him an evening of ecstatic explosion. In the same chateau 200 years later, a man named Vincent, at an entomology conference, lost the beautiful Julie after some eye-bulging sex by the pool at the chateau and whereupon suffered the ridicule of his peers.

Reading this book is so much like witnessing some farce into which one renders helpless to stick his oars. A man Berck, an avid practitioner of "dancer politics" (seeking glory but not power, always centering on stage and keeping others off-stage), made a fool of himself pretending to kiss some AIDS patient to paint the image of a well-wisher. Berck then went off to Somalia and greeted the famished children not through a surge of vanity but because he felt obliged to make up for a botched dance step. Then entered some Czech entomologist who, by merely aloud what he thought, was deprived of the very meaning of his life. He was to give a speech of his research at the conference. But instead he found Vincent and Julie making out by the pool. Another woman Immaculata decided to jilt her cameraman lover, walked out the hotel room where they had had sex (to be more precisely, a sequence of parading anger, forcing submission, the actual sex, falling over, throwing stuffs around, pulling a tantrum, feigning fear, sex again and so on...), stormed through the pool and realized with utter clarity the snare closing around her: her pursuer behind and the water ahead. She jumped into the pool like an awkward diver pricked with cramping limbs.

I kept asking myself the same question during the one-sitting read: what's the point of all these people and sex talk? Surely Kundera had achieved what he had anticipated-to slow down the story of the two couples and stuff in outrageous digression and meditation of sexual politics. But I think he had gone too far in trying to establishment some connection with Kissinger and this journalist woman who had a morbid crush on him and wrote about her crush in a book.

If this book tries to convey a point or some life lesson, it's hedonism. Pleasure cannot be experienced to the full unless it slowly works the way up to climax. It aims (maybe a little too high) at the secret bond between slowness and memory, about how speed infringes slowness and happiness. To me it's a book that somehow loses its bearing. Pass it if you have better books to read. 3.0 stars. (2.0 stars for the content but I have to give an extra star for the cunning, painfully humorous prose!)