Slowness: A Novel
Books / Paperback
ISBN: 0060928417 / Publisher: Harper Perennial, April 1997
Two simultaneous stories, both taking place in a French chateau two centuries apart, detail the sexual encounters of an eighteenth-century couple and the absence of sex for a twentieth-century married couple and compares the "morning after" of the two men
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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.
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