• Title: Slowness
• Author: Milan Kundera
• Genre/Subject: 20th century literature
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication Date: 1995
• Start date: 8/15/24
• Finish date: 8/16/24

Review:

Well, this was weird. Straight up peculiar and odd. I didn’t hate it, but I sure didn’t “get it”, that is if there was anything to get. I’m still not sure if I missed the joke, or the punchline, or the point.

I’ve been meaning to read Milan Kundera for years because he has such a cool, literary sounding name. Seriously. Like Italo Calvino or Umberto Eco, even James Michener, some names just sound like you need to read them.

From the back cover: “Slowness…. 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.” Well, okay, if you say so.

Maybe I’m just getting old, but there’s good weird like James Joyce, and there’s bad weird like speaker of the house Mike Johnson. This was the latter if you ask me. Consider this line: Vincent exclaims “Look!” and points to the moon. “It looks like an ass hole drilled into the sky!” To think I wasted all that time reading Proust when I was missing out on prose like this.

This is the type of book and the type of author that becomes the darling of the book review columnists and the self-proclaimed literati. But it would seem to miss the popular appeal that despite the centuries keeps Tolstoy popular. Or Clive Cussler for fucks sakes. What I’m getting at is that reading literature is fun, it’s supposed to be. But you can’t just go and try to make writing into “literature” any more than you can go and try to make a new punk scene. If you’re trying to do it then it’s not going to work, it has to be organic.

That being said, I didn’t hate reading this and I will for sure check out more of Kundera’s novels, The Joke, The Unbearable Lightness of Being to name a few. Read this, you might get it, maybe you’ll love it, but this just was not for me.