Synopsis
Milan Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this author's fictional works to have been written in French.
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. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret 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.
About Milan; Asher, Linda Kundera
See more books from this AuthorElegantly fashioned and almost forbiddingly urbane new novel, written in French, by the renowned Czech author of such ironical and sophisticated fictions as The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984).
May 20 2010 | Read Full Review of Slowness : A Novel (NOVEL, FI...Kundera's latest (after Immortality) is a scintillating jeu d'esprit, as coolly elegant and casually brutal as the 18th-century French arts to which the text pays tribute. Indeed, this is the expatria
Apr 29 1996 | Read Full Review of Slowness : A Novel (NOVEL, FI...The paintings of Fragonard and Watteau, Sade's La Philosophie dans le boudoir, Laclos's Les Liaisons dangereuses and an obscure novella entitled Point de lendemain, by Vivant Denon, are all invoked by the narrator, who may be Kundera himself (his wife calls him ""Milanku"").
| Read Full Review of Slowness : A Novel (NOVEL, FI...The comic two-stroke of "Slowness"--bring a character to life and lecture to it--makes it evident why, though Kundera was an exiled dissident from Communist Czechoslovakia, some of his fellow dissidents have had very little love for him.
May 12 1996 | Read Full Review of Slowness : A Novel (NOVEL, FI...Reviews Philosophy About Our Affiliates Books & Audios Recently Reviewed The ancient humanists taught us that the life of the spirit flourishes in the presence of a playful, relaxed, and carefully focused life of pleasure.
| Read Full Review of Slowness : A Novel (NOVEL, FI...An aggregated and normalized score based on 45 user ratings from iDreamBooks & iTunes