The Discovery of Slowness

Sten Nadolny

Writing was as arduous as a sea voyage; it generated the energies and hopes it needed while also providing enough for the rest of one’s life. Whoever had to write a book could not be desperate forever. And despair over proper formulations could be conquered with sufficient industry.

He also sat in coffee houses. There he could get pen, ink, and paper whenever anything important occurred to him. Actually nothing occurred to John, but he ordered writing materials just the same, stared at the white sheet of paper, and thought, If I have something important in mind, I’ll just write it down. Well, perhaps it also worked the other way round: If I have something to write on, perhaps something important will come to me. And so it happened: suddenly the Idea appeared. It seemed foolhardy to John, but that spoke more for the Idea than against it, especially since the project was in some respects similar to a long journey. The Idea: writing! John conceived of writing a book to justify himself, a fat book in which he would seek to convert all skeptics and convince them of his system. And since he knew what a footloose fellow the human will was, he committed himself in writing then and there. He wrote on the white sheet: Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea—not under 100,000 words. That rescued the plan at the last minute, for the head had already begun to whisper its objections. For example, John Franklin, if there is anything you cannot do, it’s writing books!

The compulsion to be constantly occupied with what is important to mankind necessarily affected more and more thoughts and actions. John sensed that someday, simply out of duty toward equality, he would have to discover that he was interchangeable with others. But from his time in the navy he knew full well what it was like when one’s unique self became insignificant. There remained only the escape into quickness. Someone was better if he could do the same thing faster. And this choice was not open to him.

That’s not the point, replied Eleanor. This sentence worried John, for since the time with Flora Reed he knew only too well: a quarrel in which one person told the other what it was all about left no room for a solution.

We ourselves are the chance. The listeners turned their heads: Franklin. Not that they had understood him. But if anybody considered carefully what he said, it was Franklin. So they still thought about it for a little while. He always had the courage to look stupid long enough to be smart—one could well copy that! In other respects, too, he had a tough skull. No bullet could get through it. God surely still had plans for Franklin. They helped him where they could.

Friendship consisted of plans and actions; everything else only falsified it.

I have been reading many books about Sir John Franklin lately. The Terror by Dan Simmons which was so pathetic I didn't read more than a quarter of it; Rifles by William Vollmann which I did finish, and also this one by Sten Nadonly. Of all of them, I think I like Nadonly's portrayal of Franklin the best. It is by far the most sympathetic. Simmons' painted Franklin as a selfish, deluded, simpering idiot. Vollmann made him a haggard old failure of a man, but Nadonly gave him something unique.
I don't imagine that Nadonly's fiction of Franklin is anything other than fiction, but as long as we are dealing with things I don't know, I'd like to now know Franklin in this way rather than any other.
The Discovery of Slowness is rich with the marvel of a child. Nadonly's Franklin moves through the world as a circle within a circle, somehow cut off from the reality by his slow speed. It gives you a sense of peering out of a submarine at the ocean world rather than being a fish with Franklin in the sea. It's a pleasant feeling.