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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 two hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. In the eighteenth-century narrative, the marvelous Madame de T. summons a young nobleman to her chateau one evening and gives him an unforgettable lesson in the art of seduction and the pleasures of love.In the same chateau at the end of the twentieth 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.… (more)
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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.
I'm going to re-title it 'Slightness' (unbearable, but there it is...). Is that due to the philosophical slights of hand that the author performs? No. To me, it really did feel rather insubstantial. The novella comprises two romances staged across a single night, one set in current times and the other in the eighteenth century. I think that the modern day episodes were supposed to be funny. I just found them rather silly. The philosophical elements felt bolted on. None of the characters were believable. I wanted to like it. Although it pains me to say it, if I'd come to this book first, I might never have read the others. Perhaps I've missed the point. Please, someone persuade me that I have...
I reread this in the last year or so, largely to see if it had