Slowness

"Irresistible. . . . Slowness is an ode to sensuous leisure, to the enjoyment of pleasure rather than just the search for it." -- Mirabella

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.

Author: Milan Kundera
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 04/11/1997
Pages: 176
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.31lbs
Size: 8.06h x 5.44w x 0.41d
ISBN: 9780060928414

Review Citation(s):
New York Times 06/08/1997 pg. 32
NY Times Notable Bks of Year 01/01/1997 pg. 97

About the Author
Kundera, Milan: -

The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929-2023) was born in Brno and lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975 until his death. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves--all originally in Czech. His more recent novels, Slowness, Identity, Ignorance, and The Festival of Insignificance, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.