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Slowness by Kundera, Milan

ISBN: 9780571179435 PUBLISHER: Faber FORMAT: Paperback PAGES: 144 PUBLICATION DATE: 1.7.2005 DIMENSIONS: 19 x 12 x 1 centimetres 4.2 ounces

DESCRIPTION: 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 200 years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. In the 18th-century narrative, the marvelous Madame de T. summons a young nobleman to her chbteau one evening and gives him an unforgettable lesson in the art of seduction and the pleasures of love. In the same chbteau at the end of the 20th 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 n

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