Yet there are troubling aspects too. Writers who portray degradation find it hard wholly to escape the stain of their subject. Readers of the author's celebrated novel 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting' . . . will find the same ironic tone and brilliance of annotation of the fearful emptiness of Eastern European life under Communist management . . . The Art of the Novel' recommends self-effacement as a precept of writing and dooms purveyors of dogma in either literature or criticism. As always, its author proves himself to be a master of orchestrating leitmotifs.
Nothing is random in the text . . .
What may sound leaden in summary is effervescent in the reading. But, for all its audacity, wit and sheer brilliance, I miss here the expansive feel of the earlier novels. There are parts of 'Slowness' that feel uncharacteristically heavy-handed. Kundera, living as an expatriate in Paris, had become identified as the leading representative of Czech literature. Since the fall of Communism, Kundera had not allowed his books to be published in Czechoslovakia, nor had he made any official visits.