Slowness: A Novel

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: 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!)