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Title: Slowness: A Novel by Milan Kundera, Linda Asher ISBN: 0-06-092841-7 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 May, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.56 (34 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Philosophical Burlesque
Comment: When an author tries to tackle the serious philosophical issues more often than not what comes out is mush. Witness Anne Rice losing all credibility, cringe as Victor Hugo goes into another 100 pages about the virtues of the church. What makes Milan Kundera succeed where others fail is his innate ability to keep us engaged while playfully backing away when things get too gradschool snoblike. At first this is a novel about ideas. The idea of slowness to begin with and the fascinating notion of Moral Judo in which all interactions are power struggles. With wit and clarity these ideas are introduced and then with a sledgehammer Kundera proceeds to lead us into a sex farce. Halfway through the book the characters which were only floating embodiments of example, end up at of all places an entemologist convention and then proceed to expose themselves as the ridiculous human beings that they are. Suddenly you are in one of the funniest books ever and you don't know when it happened. However the title gets subverted as the speed increases. At the end when we are back to the Chevalier and his affair and the slowness issue we have already been partying with the best of them. Absurdity mixes with philosophy and Kundera in this slim volume changes our perceptions of the world, if only for a short time
Rating: 3
Summary: A book that somehow loses its bearing....
Comment: 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!)
Rating: 4
Summary: Undisputedly original, with an erratic charm of its own...
Comment: 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
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Title: Identity: A Novel by Milan Kundera ISBN: 0060930314 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 May, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Ignorance : A Novel by Milan Kundera ISBN: 0060002107 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 30 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Immortality by Milan Kundera, Peter Kussi ISBN: 0060932384 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 November, 1999 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, Aaron Asher ISBN: 0060932147 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 April, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: The Joke (Definitive Version) by Milan Kundera ISBN: 006099505X Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 01 April, 1993 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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