Slowness

Milan Kunderas lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, Slowness is also the first of this authors fictional works to have been written in French.Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummers 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 eras 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 just merely a perpetual show emptied of every intimacy and every joy.