SOURCE: "Speed," in New York Times Book Review, July 7, 1996, p. 5.

In the following review, Goreau outlines the plot of Slowness, admiring its complexity of themes despite its brevity.

Metaphysical speculation was once happily married to the novel, practiced to great effect by masters like Voltaire and Diderot. Since the end of the Enlightenment, however, the philosophical novel—as opposed to the novel of ideas or the novel of social protest—has become a rarity. Milan Kundera, who has more or less single-handedly reinvented the form for his own use, is careful to point out that his novels are not engaged in the translation of philosophy into fiction. His modus operandi is to bring ideas into play—floating hypotheses, improvising, interrogating.

In roomy, expansive novels like The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and, most recently, Immortality, he uses an astonishing spectrum of instruments to...