A simple gesture recalled an elderly woman turning and smiling girlishly at the young lifeguard at the end of her swimming lesson leads Milan Kundera and his reader through Immortality (1991), an archly beguiling novel within several novels. With Slowness (Faber, £12.99 in UK), his first in five years, and his first written in French, the self exiled Czech writer continues in his now familiar philosophical and increasingly personalised whimsical tone. Kundera appears to be forcing the novel to become meditation. Fiction has, for him, yield to elegant reflection.
Pleasure is his theme; pleasure, as well as the inability to recognise it. At one point in the new book he begins to define the term "hedonism as a moral tendency to a life of sensuality", and then ponders Epicurus's "highly sceptical understanding of the happy life". As the novel opens, the narrator and his, wife are driving in the French countryside: "We suddenly had the urge to spend the evening and night in a chateau. Many of them in France have become hotels: a square of greenery lost in a stretch of ugliness without greenery; a little plot of walks, trees, birds in the midst of a vast network of highways." While they are driving, they notice a speeding car approaching. "The small left light is blinking, and the whole car emits waves of impatience."
The stage is set for another Kundera meditation slowness as memory versus forgetful speed; "Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared?" Taking the cue from the urgency of others, his wife remarks: "Every fifty minutes somebody dies on the road in France. Look at them, all these madmen tearing along around us." The narrator thinks of a corresponding image, that of a motorcyclist "caught in a fragment of time cut off from both the past and the future ... he is outside time". Meanwhile, heavy traffic is foiling the aspiring overtaker. Refusing to adjust his own leisurely speed, the narrator debates: "Beside the driver sits a woman. Why doesn't the man tell her something funny? Why doesn't he put his hand on her knee?"
For all its apparent ease, this slim work is cunningly constructed. The narrator/author's thoughts move on to another journey made some two hundred years earlier towards a country chateau. The leisureliness of his own trip is juxtaposed with the urgency of a couple about to become lovers. "It is the first time they are so close to each other, and the inexpressible atmosphere of sensuality around them springs from the very slowness of the rhythm." Predictably, he contrasts their mutual excitement with the slow motion of the carriage they travel in.
The lovers are characters in a novella, Vivant Denon's libertine Point de lendemain, first published anonymously in 1777. The narrator outlines the plot - which records one night of frantic love orchestrated merely to provide an erring wife with an alibi designed to protect her long time lover - and then moves on to a detailed account of its complex publishing history. According to him, "the art of the 18th century drew pleasures out of the fog of moral prohibitions", and offers de Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses as one of the greatest novels of all time". He compares the world of that novel to "an enormous resonating seashell where every whispered word reverberates, swells, into multiple and unending echoes." It is an image which slowly takes over Slowness itself with its pattern of constant overlapping.
There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting." At times, a gentle sense of longing appears set to take over the book. But the narrator is curious about feelings and sensations in general. His caring concern is at its most sympathetic when he is thinking about the fictional young man exhausted by a night of love which means nothing to his lady friend. When his attention shifts the romantic entanglements of his own milieu, the narrator is more amused than moved by frustration, rejection and failure.
The elegance of the grand chateau is somewhat modified by the playful device of bringing an assorted bunch of not very interesting characters together to attend, an entomological conference. Two media rivals have previously competed for the perfect photo opportunity; a young man attempts to shock by claiming his girlfriend hankers after rough sex; a woman insulted by a man who once lusted after her and she in turn avenges herself by humiliating her devoted lover. The brief anecdotal sketches flicker in and out of the narrative like doors opening and closing in a standard farce.
Reporting his wife's irritation at Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, the benignly indolent narrator permits memories of a previous visit to appear to shape an account of a farcical night of romantic delusions and comic misadventures. The effect is of sitting back and watching a group of people running about act,ing foolishly, and asking oneself, Why am I watching this? It is funny, though, possibly Kundera's most comic book, thanks to its calculating cartoon collage structure.
Conversational, complacent, a mite smug, certainly dilettantish.
Slowness is sustained by intellectual trickery yet exudes an impersonal charm. At peace with the world, his world, the mildly amused, voyeuristic narrator displays the contentment of an individual more given to detached philosophical observation than involvement. It does appear that Kundera, by remaining in the thoughtful mood arrived at in Immortality, has decided to concentrate more on memory, random reflection, anecdotes and cleverly deliberate, informal essays, than on conventional narrative. Far from being tormented by his art - or anything else - he enjoys teasing ideas and playing with information. Kundera has already dissected the form in his study, The Art of The Novel (Paris, 1986; London 1988), and has exhaustively explored his own specialist subjects - Laughter, Being, Forgetting, Memory and Slowness; one might wonder where else is left for his art to practise its pirouettes, never mind its little jokes. As pleasing as a gentle walk beside the lake, Slowness leaves one wondering at its immense indolence and self satisfaction, not to mention the possibly unbearable cleverness of being Milan Kundera.