Book Review : An Aversion to the Hasty Proves Slow and Steady

The Discovery of Slowness by Sten Nadolny, translated by Ralph Freedman (Elisabeth Sifton Books/Viking: $19.95; 325 pages)

“Whoever goes to sea cannot be desperate for long,� reflects Sir John Franklin, the protagonist of Sten Nadolny’s beguiling philosophical tale, “The Discovery of Slowness.�

The German writer seeks a talisman against the desperation of modern life. His image of this desperation is speed; his remedy is slowness. Not so much a slowness of physical motion, as of apprehension, judgment and response. We do not give ourselves time to see things, people and events as they are; we do not penetrate into their essences.

None of this does Nadolny say. Instead, he has created a fictional exemplar based upon the real figure of the 19th-Century English seaman and polar explorer. As Falstaff may have been based upon Sir John Fastolfe, an English knight, Nadolny’s John Franklin may be based on Falstaff. He stands at a half-turn from the world around him, and revealing in that half-turn the possibilities of a considerably different world.

Franklin is a fabulous personage and an innocent. He is estranged from life by a peculiar trait, and it is by living out that estrangement in a parallel orbit that he shifts the notion of what life must necessarily be. Perhaps it can be something else.

Nadolny imagines the Lincolnshire childhood of a boy who stands out from his fellows by his aversion, amounting to incapacity, to anything hasty. He can hold a jump rope for an hour at a time, but he cannot catch a ball. Not, that is, until he devises a way to make use of his genius for long attention. He steadily regards a point where the ball will be; he ambushes it.

Franklin likes slow things: watching the fire on the hearth, looking at the facades of houses and at grazing cows. He detests chickens with their perpetual excitable bustling. He dreams of the contemplative rhythms of sailing.

He runs away to sea--slowly--and is caught and brought back, but convinces his family to let him study seamanship. He does everything slowly but well; when a mathematics teacher insists on hurrying over an explanation, young Franklin grabs him by the neck and forces him to stop.

Later, as a naval midshipman, his deliberate movements under fire will give an example of reassurance. When there is hand-to-hand fighting, incapable of the fast moves of swordsmanship, he simply seizes his antagonist and slowly strangles him.

This should not suggest anything heavy or lumbering. Nadolny’s Franklin is the opposite; he is light, delicate of feeling and utterly original. He is like someone who lags on a hike and when you turn to see why, he is gently unearthing a multicolored mushroom that nobody else had noticed.

As with his method for catching a ball, he uses his difference not to keep apart from the world but to find answers it does not have. If, at sea, his reactions are slow, he compensates by studying every possibility beforehand. To an officer who berates him for slowness, he argues that a ship’s speed is inflexibly limited by the shape of its hull, “and so it is with me.�

But his thorough preparations eventually make him into a superlative officer. “He gave orders the way a carpenter drives nails, each straight in deep until it holds.�

Again, though, it is not plodding but insight. As a commander, he finds himself fast-moving subordinates while he takes time to look at things harder. And he waits--sometimes to the indignation and alarm of those around him--to learn what a situation really calls for before responding to it. “He always had the courage to look stupid long enough to be smart.�

It is only slowness that can be original, and it is as an explorer of the unknown that Franklin comes into his own. Nadolny’s accounts of his childhood, apprenticeship at sea, battles and explorations are beautifully told. The carnage at Trafalgar, the horrors of a calamitous Arctic trek are related with a kind of disassembling slow motion which, reminiscent of Stephen Crane’s battle scenes, finds in a near-dream state the only possible way to convey an overwhelming reality.

Franklin is not infallible; his life takes odd turnings and inconclusive sidesteps. Still less, does he consider himself infallible. He goes through spells of depression and self doubt. His originality is prophesy of a kind, but it is tiring to be a prophet.

After Trafalgar, he tells a small boy about a giant Monitor lizard he has seen in Timor. He identifies with it; and surprises himself with the anger he feels as he describes its qualities.

“The lizard Salvator doesn’t flee. But it also doesn’t like to fight, that’s against its nature. He’s smart like a human and enjoys friends. But he barely moves--most of the time he just sits--and so he finds few friends. He grows older than the other animals; all his friends die before he does.�

Deeper Current

Under the endearing oddities, the unexpected discoveries and the absorbing adventures of Franklin, there is a deeper current flowing. Nadolny’s vision of what a man, or mankind, might be if it were different, is conveyed with restraint and a charm inseparable from the unforgetable character he has created. He has written a Utopia of character.

His writing, splendidly translated from the German by Ralph Freedman, is limpid and suggestive. After Franklin’s first sexual experience, as original as everything else about him, Nadolny writes:

“For a long time the pleasant scent of her skin lingered on his mind and he continued to hope that the slowness of women had something to do with his own.�