Slowness – Milan Kundera

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically, he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who tries to forget a disagreeable incident he has lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time.

This one passage justifies reading this odd concoction on its own, brief as it is. Otherwise, the book is a bit of a mish-mash of ideas that struggle to cohere. There are some nice moments, but the attempts at erotica are toe-curling.