BOOKS

A satisfying sexual act

Philip Hensher

SLOWNESS by Milan Kundera Faber, £12.99, pp.132 by Milan Kundera Faber, £12.99, pp.132 The film of The Unbearable Lightness of Being propelled the Czech novelist Milan Kundera to an unenviable sort of fame. It gave birth to a hundred feebly punning headlines on the title, and a single abiding image, a naked woman in a bowler hat. Bowler hats on women have been shorthand for middle-European sauciness since Liza Minnelli's Sally Bowles, and probably long before. Before that, Kundera had been a well-appreciated novelist, with a strong Czech taste for droll absurdities. Afterwards, he seems to be pretty widely regarded as an old sexist writing lightweight books about having it off in Central Europe. Our great-grandfathers used to read silly French novels for their titillation (`French, eh?' the customs officer says in Vile Bodies, confiscating Dante's Inferno); we prefer, it might seem, silly Czech novels.

Kundera is certainly somewhat preoccu- pied with sex, not, despite his admirers' claims, relations between the sexes; just sex. His attitudes, it appears, can be those of an unreconstructed chauvinist, and it's male experience which he describes, and which he relishes. The little erotic fail- ures which litter his pages are not necessar- ily evidence of weakness, indeed they often have the air of an egoist's self-depreciation, as if to bear witness to his male characters' invincibility in other, more usual circum- stances. But the odd thing is that this feature, which might suggest a failure of imagination in other writers, is quite unob- jectionable in Kundera. He writes with a strong bias towards the point of view of the man. So what? Why apologise for it? He is frankly uninterested in conventional pieties, and if he writes about sex a good deal, it is not because he wants to propa- gate a particular line about the relations between the sexes, but because sex is both private and absurd. And privacy and absur- dity — not mistresses in bowler hats, not adultery, not po-faced political allegory are Kundera's real subjects.

It's in keeping with the paradoxical, play- ful nature of this intriguing divertissement that a book called Slowness should begin with the word 'suddenly'. But slowness and speed aren't the real subjects of this book. Rather, Kundera has devised an ingenious triple plot which explores the ideas of secrecy and display, perhaps, most of the time, secrecy on display. The central idea of the book is that of the conversational performer, someone who takes over debate, not to enlighten or, really, to enter- tain, but simply 'to take over the stage so as to beam forth his self. Kundera call these characters 'dancers', and, whether they are a bar anecdotalist holding forth, or a bore on a chat show challenging other guests to show their support for this month's fashionable cause, they are famil- iar figures. 'When we're together, you and I,' one character tells a 'dancer', 'and someone joins us, the place we're in sud- denly splits in two, the newcomer and I are down in the audience, and you, you're dancing up there on the stage.'

Kundera is interested in the absurdity of putting a private compassion on public display, and it sparks off a witty plot about, improbably enough, a conference of ento- mologists. A Czech entomologist, invited to the West for the first time, precedes his paper on the domestic fly with a moving, conventional encomium to freedom — 'as you know, tens of thousands of men, the entire intelligentsia of my country, were driven from their positions after the tragic summer of 1968'. It is unfortunate that, after the applause, he forgets to give his paper about the fly. A celebrated intellec- tual, Berek, a 'dancer', approaches him subsequently, ostensibly to offer his friend- ship and praise, but actually, of course, to show off for the television cameras. Simultaneously, a young participant at the conference, discouraged by the partici- pants' egoism, or, more accurately, his fail- ure to create a stage for his own ego, picks up a young woman and seduces her.

The seduction is fascinatingly peculiar; in privacy, there seems little or no point to it, and they are shy with each other. In the public setting of a swimming pool at night, however, with the possibility of people watching them, they perform the sexual act with gusto, formalising it into exactly that, and no more, a performance for 'an audi- ence, imagined and imaginary, potential and virtual . . . for those who are not there but could be there'. It's characteristic of Kundera that the seduction, carried out not to please each other but an imaginary audience, doesn't seem hollow or meaning- less. The sex itself is a failure, in the ordi- nary sense. But, for the two of them, it is a success, the invisible audience is pleased, and that, rather than giving plea- sure to each other, is what matters.

This strange and poignant idea is ampli- fied by an invented 18th-century novella, Point de lendemain, in which a naive young man becomes an aristocrat's publicly acknowledged lover for one night in order to mask her real and permanent lover. But it's the third strand of the book, in which a novelist called Milan talks to his wife about writing, in which the fable seems to find its meaning. In the disquisitions about privacy and performance, Kundera is not really talking about chat-show hypocrites and bar-stool bores; he is providing a paradoxi- cal, Wildean allegory of the artist.

It's an unusually satisfying little book, all the strands of ideas are neatly woven and come together gratifyingly at the end. But I wonder whether it isn't, in fact, a little too satisfying. The ideas work perfectly together, as ideas. The simplicity and neat- ness of the demonstration, however, would not, I think, have been quite so easy if Kun- dera had allowed his characters a little more life. We don't have much of a sense of these characters' individuality. They remain sharply etched types, without much real indepen- dence of thought — Vincent, the naive acolyte, Berck, the gaffe-prone intellectual, and so on. Their behaviour, we feel, is driven by Kundera's ideas, and not by their own. They do not surprise us, and they would not have been allowed to surprise their author by acting against his ideas.

And, though the thinking is genuinely fresh and engaging, there is, from time to time, a suspicion that Kundera is creating a sense of profundity by a particular rhetorical trick. After the first description of 'dancers', we might justifiably take away the impression that such people are being attacked. But not at all. Kundera, or his character, assures us that the denigration is not meant, that 'dancers' are, in a way, heroic:

Anyone who dislikes dancers and wants to denigrate them is always going to come up against an insuperable obstacle: their decen- cy, because with his constant exposure to the public, the dancer condemns himself to being irreproachable.

It's not very convincing, and it's less convincing when the same tactic is tried after the Czech scientist's humiliation. He too finds heroism where it could not have been expected to be found'

It's true he is ridiculous, but there is nothing negative, nothing shameful or disagreeable, in that, the ridiculousness that has befallen him intensifies still more the inherent melan- choly of his life, renders his destiny still sad- der, and hence still grander and more beautiful.

But, though this repeated twist isn't the sign of complex or subtle thinking, it does indicate something genuinely appealing and attractive in Slowness, a rhetorical taste for absurdity and for paradox. It's an unusual, and, in many ways, a very pleasing book, rather like an 18th-century fable in its grey elegance and wit. At one point, the novelist's wife reminds him of his mother's advice:

Milanku, stop making jokes. No one will understand you. You will offend everyone, and everyone will end up hating you.

Remember? . I'm warning you. Serious- ness kept you safe. The lack of seriousness will leave you naked to the wolves. And you know they're waiting for you, the wolves are.. .

It's hard to think of a worse piece of advice to offer this intensely serious, engagingly witty novelist; I hope he never takes it