WULOLIFE
Slowness Author: Milan Kundera Publisher: Shanghai Translation Publishing House
Slowness Author: Milan Kundera Publisher: Shanghai Translation Publishing House
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Description
Introduction · · · · · ·
* Milan Kundera's most relaxing work
* A "slow" novel focusing on the spiritual life of modern people
* When speed becomes a devil that confuses people's hearts, can the world still rediscover the art of "slowness"?
* A "slow" novel that focuses on the spiritual life of modern people, thinking about how people can find the art of slowness in an era of pursuit of speed;
* Three stories that interweave time and space, a hilarious life stage, "modern people pursue instant gratification", does this "fast" make us happier?
* A thought-provoking book for the soul: What has technology brought to mankind? When the whole world is trapped by the epidemic, has the world "slowed down"?
The book comes with a customized Milan Kundera themed sticker
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"Slowness" is the first novel written in French by Milan Kundera after he immigrated to France. It perfectly blends the real and the imaginary, the past and the present.
In the novel, the author and his wife Vera go to a castle that has been converted into a hotel to spend the weekend. When driving on the road, a motorcycle speeds past, which makes the author think about speed. This reminds him of the story of the lady and the young knight in the novel "Tomorrow Never Comes" by the 18th century French writer Vivant Denon. Intertwined with it is the absurd night of a group of modern people: one day in the 20th century, a group of entomologists gathered at the castle hotel for a seminar, and staged one ridiculous farce after another.
"Slowness is a sign of happiness." Compared with the heavy topics discussed in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, the theme of Slowness seems surprising. It is obviously the lightest novel among all Kundera's works. There is "not a single serious word" in the whole work. The author himself once said: "There is not a single serious word in the work."
His works have given me the firm belief that humanity will survive, the world will survive, and that everything I believe in, seek and desire in this world with all my heart will regain its human face.
I am grateful to him because on this tragic day, he has made me realize more strongly than ever that even death is powerless in the face of immortality.
——French writer Louis Aragon
I have only read The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Waltz of Farewell, and I like them very much. They are quite different from Latin American and American writers... The satire in the novels is a bit like black humor, but not completely, forming a unique flavor.
——Mo Yan
A nation and country without memories will not have history. If there is no memory and history, what does the future represent? According to Kundera, just like the young man driving a fast car in the book, "he has been thrown out of the continuity of time, he is outside of time, he has entered a state of ecstasy, he has forgotten his age, his wife, his children, so he is not afraid of anything, because the source of fear is the future, so a person who is freed from the future is fearless." For me, this person who does not fear the future has no future either.
——Leo Ou-fan Lee
About the Author
Milan Kundera (1929- )
A world-renowned novelist and literary critic. Born in Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1929, he has lived in France since 1975. He has written 16 works, including novels such as "The Joke", "Life is Elsewhere", "Farewell Waltz", "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting", "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", "Immortality", "Slowness", "Identity", "Ignorance", "Celebrating Meaninglessness", short story collection "Laughable Love", essay collection "The Art of the Novel", "The Betrayed Will", "Curtain", "Meeting", and drama "Jacques and His Master". He won the Medici Foreign Novel Prize in 1973, the Jerusalem Literature Prize in 1985, the French Academy Literature Prize in 2001, and the Franz Kafka International Literature Prize in 2020.
Ma Zhencheng
A famous French literature translator and winner of the first "Fu Lei Translation Award". His representative translations include "The Complete Essays of Montaigne" and "All Men Are Mortal". He is also the translator of "Slowness" and "Celebrating Meaninglessness" in the "Kundera Works Series".
