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After the gravity of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, Slowness comes as a surprise: it is certainly Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, with, as the author himself says, "not a single serious word in it"; then, too, it is the first of his novels to have been written in French (in the eyes of the French public, turning him definitively into a "French writer").
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. In the eighteenth-century narrative, the marvelous Madame de T. summons a young nobleman to her chateau one evening and gives him an unforgettable lesson in the art of seduction and the pleasures of love.
In the same chateau at the end of the twentieth century, a hapless young intellectual experiences a rather less successful night. Distracted by his desire to be the center of public attention at a convention of entomologists, Vincent loses the beautiful Julie - ready and willing though she is to share an evening of intimacy and sexual pleasure with him - and suffers the ridicule of his peers.
A "morning-after" encounter between the two young men from different centuries brings the novel to a poignant close: Vincent has already obliterated the memory of his humiliation as he prepares to speed back to Paris on his motorcycle, while the young nobleman will lie back on the cushions of his carriage and relive the night before in the lingering pleasure of memory.
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Previews available in: English Chinese French
Subjects
Social life and customs, Manners and customs, Time travel, Fiction, France in fiction, Time travel in fiction, Continental european fiction (fictional works by one author), France, fiction, Romance fiction, New York Times reviewed, Fiction, generalPlaces
FranceTimes
20th century, 18th centuryShowing 5 featured editions. View all 29 editions?
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Huan man
1996, Shi bao wen hua chu ban qi yeh gu fen yu xian gong si
in Chinese
- Chu ban
9571320846 9789571320847
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"We suddenly had the urge to spend the evening and night in a chateau."
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Feedback?July 30, 2024 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
February 28, 2022 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
February 8, 2022 | Edited by dcapillae | Merge works |
February 6, 2022 | Edited by kucharczyk | Change title to French |
December 11, 2009 | Created by WorkBot | add works page |