KUNDERA, Milan Slowness 1) HarperCollins, New York, 1995
2) Uncorrected Proof Faber and Faber, London, April 1996 ~i~
1) 8vo. Grey cloth backed boards with gilt letting to spine and gilt initials 'MK' on front cover; lilac end papers; untrimmed pages at fore edge; illustrated dust wrapper designed by Suzanne Noli with an illustration by Giandomenico Tiepolo; pp. [4] 156, little bruising at bottom spine, near fine.
2) 8vo. Cream paper covers; pp. [4] 119 [1]; slight stains to front cover and edges a little rubbed, corner crease on rear cover, otherwise near fine.
First US edition signed by the author , together with the original uncorrected proof
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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