Der Schriftsteller Milan und seine Frau Vera ziehen sich für eine Nacht auf ein französisches Landschloss zurück. Sie suchen Ruhe, treffen aber stattdessen auf die extravaganten Forscher eines Fliegenkongresses. Ganz anders ergeht es dem jungen Adligen aus dem 18. Jahrhundert, der genug Muße hat, sich genau in demselben Schloss mit Madame de T. erotischen Spielen hinzugeben. Zwei Paare, zweihundert Jahre voneinander getrennt, suchen dasselbe und finden ganz Unterschiedliches. Ein amüsantes Hohelied auf die Kunst der Verführung und die Langsamkeit — ein meisterhaft komponierter Roman.

«В книгу Милана Кундеры «Смешные любови» вошли рассказы, написанные в Чехии в 1959-1968 гг. Они явились отправной точкой кундеровской прозы, в особенности его знаменитых романов «Невыносимая легкость бытия», «Бессмертие» и других. Перевод с чешского Н. Шульгиной.»

«Два небольших «французских» романа Милана Кундеры, написанных во второй половине 1990-х годов, — «Неспешность», «Подлинность». Они переведены на многие языки мира.»

All too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Kundera's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence. The present edition provides English-language readers an important further means toward revaluation of The Joke. For reasons he describes in his Author's Note, Milan Kundera devoted much time to creating (with the assistance of his American publisher-editor) a completely revised translation that reflects his original as closely as any translation possibly can: reflects it in its fidelity not only to the words and syntax but also to the characteristic dictions and tonalities of the novel's narrators. The result is nothing less than the restoration of a classic.

«A novel of irreconcilable loves and infidelities, which embraces all aspects of human existence, and addresses the nature of twentieth-century 'Being'. From the author of «Testaments Betrayed».»

After the gravity of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality, Slowness comes as a surprise: It is certainly Kundera's lightest novel, a divertimento, an opera buffa, with, as the author himself says, not a single serious word in it; then, too, it is the first of his novels to have been written in French (in the eyes of the French public, turning him definitively into a French writer). Disconcerted and enchanted, the reader follows the narrator of Slowness through a midsummer's night in which two tales of seduction, separated by more than 200 years, interweave and oscillate between the sublime and the comic. In the 18th-century narrative, the marvelous Madame de T. summons a young nobleman to her chbteau one evening and gives him an unforgettable lesson in the art of seduction and the pleasures of love. In the same chbteau at the end of the 20th century, a hapless young intellectual experiences a rather less successful night. Distracted by his desire to be the center of public attention at a convention of entomologists, Vincent loses the beautiful Julie — ready and willing though she is to share an evening of intimacy and sexual pleasure with him — and suffers the ridicule of his peers. A morning-after encounter between the two young men from different centuries brings the novel to a poignant close: Vincent has already obliterated the memory of his humiliation as he prepares to speed back to Paris on his motorcycle, while the young nobleman will lie back on the cushions of his carriage and relive the night before in the lingering pleasure of memory. Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about thesecret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about dancers possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is merely a perpetual show emptied of every intimacy and every joy. Irresistible... Slowness is an ode to sensuous leisure, to the enjoyment of pleasure rather than just the search for it. Cathleen Schine, Mirabella Audacity, wit, and sheer brilliance. New York Times Book Review Paradoxically, Slowness... is the fastest paced of Kundera's novels as well as the most accessible.

Kundera whirls through comedy and tragedy towards his central question: how does a person, any person, live today? In constructing his answer, he writes of politics, sex, literature, modern man's alienation — and of their antidotes: laughter and forgetting.