Slowness Of Being

Speaking of which, one of the distinctive features of bowel movements is slowness. You can't hurry shit. A colon is nearly a full stop: nature intended it that way. It made our biorhythms such that things done in a hurry are usually less valuable and memorable than things done savouringly. The slowness of intestines suggests how we ought to live—unhurriedly, relishing the moment, licking the last lingering drops on a wineglass, using calligraphic pens to write letters and refusing to look at e-mail.

This somewhat overdone apologia for relaxed living considers two episodes, both of which occur within the same location—a French chateau—in two different centuries. The first of these symbolises sexuality and amorous relations in 18th-century France. The second of these relates to the same subjects in contemporary times. The contrast between these two events suggests the social and technological transformations which have, via the industrial revolution, valorised Speed and margin-alised Slowness.

This theme is announced epigrammatically on the second page: "Speed is the form of ecstasy the technical revolution has bestowed on man.... Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yes-teryear?" Technology has finished them off, says Kundera. Motorcycle maniacs and highway car drivers are examples of the new ecstasy. Technology has empowered them with Speed. Michael Jackson, a frenzied black man entirely reconstructed by cosmetic technology into near-Aryan perfection, has inherited the earth. Who reads Samuel Johnson's slow sentences anymore? If the book's cover did not say that this attack on modernity was authored by Kundera, the voice could almost be Ashis Nandy's.

Slowness is a capacious notion in Kundera's vocabulary. Like one of Raymond Williams' keywords, it is a term he endows with broad cultural significance and moral value. It encompasses several attributes which are being inexorably sidelined by modernity—classical music, vagabondage, creative idling, stargazing, walking, meditating. The flavour of the book shows Kundera's affinity with ecological critiques of overdevelopment and the consequent loss of green environments which enable these varied forms of Slowness of flourish.

The novella is made up of elaborations on this theme, using history, fiction, biography, authorial reflections. There are also variations on the theme, using digressions. And finally a recapitulation: the technique is the 'Air and Variations' from classical music which Kundera has successfully patented.

But the stuff of the book is less good than usual for Kundera, apart from being rather (engagingly) over the top, like Nandy. The fictional element is nearly non-existent, the epigrams and the prophetic philosophising have risen alarmingly. The work is too opinion laden, and the opinions are not all that convincing. The amblers of yesteryear may have diminished in number, the Michael Jackson fans may have overcrowded the earth, the gipsies may have had to settle down as spare-parts dealers, but there is more than a reasonable case for countering Kundera's views with the argument that technology does not altogether erase Slowness while enabling Speed. There's still room for choosing between the two and they still manage to coexist.

That apart, this novella resembles a fragment which didn't quite manage to fit into Immortality. It looks more like a redundant afterword to that excellent work than something fully fleshed and autonomous. When random amateur philosophising takes over as completely as it does here, the whole thing works neither as fiction nor as philosophy. In the '50s everyone swore by Andre Gide, who wrote several terribly similar Frenchie short fictions full of large notions and no story. Slowness, like those, has little more than scattered memorable thoughts. Among these is an over-witty comparison of Beethoven's Ode to Joy to an erect penis, and the use in music of ritardando (which means 'holding back') with its usefulness in real life for prolonging sexual pleasure. Such itemised offerings are pleasant enough to read, but, unlike the thoughts in almost all of Milan Kundera's other works of fiction, they do not quite add up to anything we would really want to remember.