Review: Slowness by Milan Kundera

“I beg you, friend, be happy. I have the vague sense that on your capacity to be happy hangs our only hope.” - Milan Kundera, Slowness

Today I want to review an old book, “Slowness” by Milan Kundera. All thanks to steemit, I find many bloggers that made me want to read books again. I was browsing on steemit and found this interesting post by Hive account@nobyeni, she wrote about the art of lingering.

”To let the reader linger in the story, also means she is allowed to bring in herself into the story. Own memories, own experiences get tied up, because the reader actually has time to recollect them, to make this emotional bridge.”
-Hive account@nobyeni, The Art of Lingering

About this lingering, pausing, take time to experiencing something, and to take meanings, “Slowness” by Milan Kundera popped up in my head. I had a weird good time reading this book (more on this, later). Maybe because it’s a short novel or a novella you might say.

So, yes, that was the backstory how a good blog post has made me read Milan Kundera’s book.

There’s no need to explain more about Milan Kundera. He is the writer of those important novels like ''The Unbearable Lightness of Being,'' and ''The Book of Laughter and Forgetting''.

If you haven’t read “Slowness”, this one is a little bit different from his other works. This is his first novel to be written in French, to begin with. It is also surprisingly short, as I already mentioned above. But knowing his works, we could feel the grandeur of his remarkable signatures. A masterful display of philosophy, ideas, morality, and criticism into a rich story. This one also feels more personal because “I” in the story happened to be Milan himself.

The story begins with Vera and Milan Kundera driving out from Paris to a chateau. During the driving, a motorcyclist appears behind them and prompts a banal observation that people are fearless when they get behind the wheel. This could be the central subject of the novel: our obsession to do everything with speed. In Milan’s word: Speed is the form of ecstasy technology has given us.

We use speed to escape ourselves. When we are walking and try to remember something, Milan Kundera writes, “we slow down”. When we are trying to forget something, he writes, “we speed up.” If so, then I started to questioning, what is the meaning of being modern? Isn’t that having an ability to think and recollects memory is what made us as a human being?

At the chateau, the story started to get really weird. Milan as the narrator start to tells a story that seems to be a combination of fiction and fact. He’s imagining it, and Vera is dreaming what he imagines. I found it confusing at first.

We traveled to the past, into the story world of eighteenth-century French novella, Point de lendemain (1777; No Tomorrow) by Vivant Denon. Then we move back to the modern day where there is a man named Vincent who try to prove himself by rushing out making love to a woman. The stories were circling, again and again, if the reader is not careful enough, it would seem unconnected.

I loved Milan Kundera’s novels “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”. But this novel is different. The plot was too abstract. Milan Kundera jumps abruptly from character to character, scene to scene, interleaving through history with a rapid cut to modern day world. I do think someone could lose in the middle. Especially if they’re expecting similarity to his previous novels.

The book was written in 1995, the time when there were no cell phones; when ‘post-modern’ was a term that really hot to discuss. “Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?” he asked. Maybe he already felt it, the upcoming generation with high dependencies to the fast-paced technology.

So, I guess it is normal for me to have a hard time to digest this novel since I’m only a half-full fledged millennials. Although the novel is only about 150 pages long, I have to take it really slow to fully understand his proposal on the exploration of pleasure and how modernity is limiting the capacity to relax and enjoy things in life.

Indeed, Milan Kundera is the master of Irony. We literally need slowness to be able to enjoy Slowness.

I couldn’t help it but I feel the urge to quote this one:

“The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”