Slowness

Slowness is the first novel Milan Kundera wrote in French after moving to France. First published in 1995, it is short—the Chinese translation runs to just over fifty thousand characters. The author called it the lightest in theme of his works, with 'not a single serious sentence,' yet beneath its playful tone it discusses speed, time, memory, and forgetting. The novel unfolds across three interwoven times and spaces. The narrator 'I' and his wife Véra drive to an old castle converted into a hotel for a weekend; on the way a motorcycle roars past, raising the topic of 'speed': why speed makes one lose oneself, and why fast people forget easily. From this, 'I' recalls the eighteenth-century French writer Vivant Denon's story 'No Tomorrow'; in it, a young knight, after a performance, is invited by a noblewoman to ride with her in a carriage from Paris slowly toward a country castle, each stage of the slow journey a carefully orchestrated ritual. Set alongside this is a contemporary night: a group of entomologists holds a symposium at the castle hotel, staging a series of farces. A Czech scholar forced to work as a construction worker for twenty years after the Russian invasion is so excited during his talk that he forgets to read his script; the media-frequenting 'dancer' Berck coldly rebuffs the woman journalist Immaculata when she brings up their past; beside the pool, Vincent, eager to attract attention, and the typist Julie put on a 'simulated' performance. The slow love of the eighteenth century, the contemporary frenzy of speed, and the narrator couple's observation form a dialogue about 'whether slowness can still bring happiness.'