Slowness

Slowness is Milan Kundera's first novel for nearly five years, and it is also the first he has written in French. Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows him through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated in time by more than two hundred years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and ridiculous.

As Kundera's readers would expect, this novel, where one event follows another in quick succession, is at the same time a formidable display of existential analysis -- an analysis always ironic and amusing. Slowness (and rapidity), discretion (and exhibitionism) are the principal concepts, and those which are to the reader like vital keys for understanding life in our contemporary world.