KUNDERA, Milan Slowness HarperCollins, New York, 1995
8vo. Black cloth backed boards with silver lettering on spine and title on cover, untrimmed outter edge, encased in illustrated slipcase with rectangular cut through panel to reveal title; pp. [6] 165 [4]; slight scuffing to edge of slipcase, near fine.
First edition
Slowness was Kundera's first foray into the novel form in French and serves as a mesmorising excavation on the impact of the modern world on the individual. Narrated through the tale of a midsummer's night in which two parallel tales of seducition, estranged by more than two hundred years, interweave through both a union of the comic and the sublime; Kundera explores the symbiosis of slowness and memory and how the emerging world prioritises a depserate and greedy immediacy with the idea of life as a race of erasure, "The degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”.
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