La Lenteur de Milan Kundera, le livre qui vient à point
The Slowness of Milan Kundera, the book that comes at the right time

Author(s): Rym KHERIJI
Subject(s): Czech Literature, French Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Editura Junimea
Keywords: Milan Kundera; Slowness; speed; French-speaking literature; questioning; literary criticism;
Summary/Abstract: Slowness, the timely book" is the title of a study which explores Milan Kundera's first novel written directly in French and which raises many questions and even calls into question the writer's fame. Is slowness, as opposed to speed, positive or negative? The author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being finds here another dichotomy expressing in a different way the reflection on lightness and gravity. This allows us to question the scriptural strategies of the most French of Czech authors by probing his novel in many ways very different from the previous ones. What is slow is heavy and what is fast is light. Or would it be the reverse? At the dawn of a new millennium marked by the all-digital and computer speed, and prepared by a 20th century inscribed in the frenetic race for progress, efficiency and performance, Slowness by Milan Kundera seems to enter literature against the tide, even like a hiatus. Does memory resist the speed of passing time? How to escape oblivion when the images are superimposed on the others, erasing one after the other the strata of a strange palimpsest? We first propose to see how the slowness of Kundera is singular. Then, we will try to probe some of the questions proposed in the novel. In a third part, we will try to establish a causal link between the novel and its problematic reception.

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