Slowness: A Novel

If you are amused by thought and thinking then the works of Milan Kundera are for you. All the stuff that is flowing through your mind in observing the world turns up on the pages of his novels. I especially enjoyed "Slowness" in its discussion of how people with quiet voices have trouble fitting into social situations with all those loud voices dominating. Yes, it hits close to home.

Juxtaposed several time periods--you gotta stay with Kundera in this book, and it stands up batter than more recent efforts. Still, not sensational.

good read.

it's funny how things that make such an impression on you when you're young can be fairly unimpressive when you are older. I still found the book to be a good read, but it seemed a bit crude.

nobody ever understands how and why I read this book slowly as I did. The burden of each word had been as heavy as its brilliant title. I don't know if I had been influenced by the title itself, but i was reading half a page each day. But the meaning was so wonderfully crafted to be dense and gliding back and forth in the story, that it took me ages to come out of that party with the character. I do not recommend this book (though it is small in size) to the light reader who does not know what deep thought is. On the other hand, this book CAN teach someone how to think.

Picked this book up on a whim and thoroughly enjoyed it! A friend of mine tried to have me describe it - but I couldn't! All I could muster was that it was a real treat to read.

I was expecting a novel but this book is as much an essay or a work of philosophy given a bit of plot to move it along. It blends two stories of seduction in totally different time frames, one modern, one historic, with twists of irony and comedy. (The blurbs say two ‘love’ stories but I don’t’ agree that a male professor struggling to pick up a female grad student at an academic conference is a love story. lol) The historic romance is that of Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Choderlos de Laclos, which the author considers to be one of the greatest novels of all time.The main theme, reflected in the title, and illustrated by the story in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, is this: “There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting…the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.” The pure pursuit of pleasure, hedonism, lacks the slowness.Another theme is “who is the audience?” For the dancer “He’s showing off not for you or for me but for the whole world…An infinity with no faces! An abstraction.”The infinity with no faces has also been generated by photography. Kundera states that the nature of fame became a different thing before and after photography. He wrote this book in 1995 so I think we can expand ‘photography’ to mean mass media. Photography and, by extension, mass media, create a “worshipful fixation on famous people” and a famous person comes to “…see himself as elect [which] serves public notice on both his membership in the extraordinary and his distance from the ordinary, which is to say …from the neighbors, the colleagues, the partners, with whom he (or she) is obliged to live.”To illustrate this theme of fame, part of the story focuses on an academic Superstar in the tiny, creepy crawly world of entomology. He denigrates his academic rivals.These themes of hedonism and speed come to a head in a culminating scene where the professor and the grad student have sex by the hotel pool. The audience becomes not each other but the abstraction of the audience with no faces. The actual act is a disaster. Since “…our period is obsessed by the desire to forget, and it is to fulfill that desire that it gives over to the demon of speed,” after the debacle the professor straps on his helmet and speeds away on his motorcycle.A couple of other passages I liked:“The way contemporary history is told is like a huge concert where they present all of Beethoven’s one hundred thirty-eight opuses one after the other, but actually play just the first eight bars of each.”“He understands that that impatience to speak is also an implacable uninterest in listening.”

In almost miraculously few words, the author illustrates both the driving force and the tragedy of our era - speed - using character study, social analysis, philosophy, and poetry, to make fully a case that would have fallen apart (by its nature) if rendered less than perfectly. This novel may be this author's most underrated, most understated, and may turn out to be his largest and most lasting. With sparkling clear prose and wonderful intelligence, this short book is worth rereading.