The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 2 March 1998
by Milan Kundera
Despite its title, this small book is a rather quick read, and is different in atmosphere than Kundera's other novels. Perhaps this is because it had been five years since he had published his previous novel. Perhaps because this was his first written in French, his newly-adopted native language. The book is a slightly disjointed discourse on passion, sex, hedonism, politics (just a little) and public image. Three or four subplots melt together in its short 156 pages, all rapidly moving through a chateau in the south of France. In one story, an 18th-century couple meets in adulterous secrecy. In another, an entomologist seduces a young typist at a conference. In a third, an obsessed woman plagues a self-serving intellectual. In all there is the sense of the comic and the tragic familiar to Kundera's books. However, in its brevity and speed, some of the author's discussion of conversation and slowness in seduction and life in general gets a little lost. The book seems as if he wrote it in a fit of self-amusement. He seems conscious of that, interleaving the impatience of his wife as he imagines scenes in the novel. Overall, the book is enjoyable, but a light read from an otherwise complex writer.
Also by Kundera: [Immortality]