Product Description

There are situations in which we fail for a moment to recognize the person we are with, in which the identity of the other is erased while we simultaneously doubt our own. This also happens with couples--indeed, above all with couples, because lovers fear more than anything else "losing sight" of the loved one.

With stunning artfulness in expanding and playing variations on the meaningful moment, Milan Kundera has made this situation--and the vague sense of panic it inspires--the very fabric of his new novel. Here brevity goes hand in hand with intensity, and a moment of bewilderment marks the start of a labyrinthine journey during which the reader repeatedly crosses the border between the real and the unreal, between what occurs in the world outside and what the mind creates in its solitude.

Of all contemporary writers, only Kundera can transform such a hidden and disconcerting perception into the material for a novel, one of his finest, most painful, and most enlightening. Which, surprisingly, turns out to be a love story.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #184820 in Books
• Published on: 1999-05-01
• Released on: 1999-04-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 176 pages

Amazon.com Review
The reader sits down to dinner with Chantal, who is waiting for her lover, Jean-Marc, in a seaside hotel. While waiting to be served, she overhears two waitresses discuss the unexplained disappearance of a family man. This blatant foreshadowing posits the central question of Identity: what we think we know about our intimates is predicated on projection, primal yearnings, and the deep denial of life's impermanence. Identity reads like a musical exercise; its playing out of themes is reminiscent of a fugue. An image dropped into the narrative will be revisited from a different vantage point, tossed back and forth between the lovers; out of it will be teased every possible meaning. The 51 sparse, tiny chapters reinforce the fuguelike feel.

The plot is simple: Jean-Marc arrives at the hotel; Chantal is out walking. Near misses and mistaken identities characterize his frantic search for her, offering Kundera the opportunity to philosophize on the unknowability of the "other." They reunite; Chantal blurts out the distressing thought that's plagued her day: "Men don't turn to look at me anymore." This launches the protagonists into sketchy flashbacks, stilted dialogues, and interior monologues, all loosely bound by their embarkation on an erotic journey.

Key bits from the characters' pasts become signature refrains. Chantal, for example, has buried a son, who died at the age of 5. Strands such as this are dropped lightly in the narrative, to be pulled through later chapters like a needle with different colored threads. Later, for example, the boy's death will trigger her unpleasant realization--that it was, in the end, a "dreadful gift." Children, she thinks, keep us hopeful in the world, because "it's impossible to have a child and despise the world as it is; that's the world we've put the child into." Thus, her child's death has set her free to live out her genuine disdain of the world. Although the illogical extremes of Kundera's thought can be wildly dissonant and wondrously shocking, this reiterative device of Identity lacks energy. There's no sense of discovery about these characters. They remain flat; the style effects one like an Ingmar Bergman film when one is in the mood for Sam Peckinpah.

As if in serendipitous response to her pain in getting older, Chantal receives an anonymous "love" note. More notes follow. Will they prove Jean-Marc's attempt to sweeten her sad disclosure? Her sexual awakening begins to blur the boundaries of what's real. All well and good, but somewhere along the line, Kundera concludes that Chantal is weak because she's older. Age, we are asked to believe, becomes a wedge between the lovers, even though Chantal is only a few years older than Jean-Marc, who is himself only 42. And in the exploration of her sexuality on the wax and wane, Kundera succumbs to cliché: she is consumed too often by too many flames, and red is all used up as a symbol of violent passion. On the subject of male and female desire, Kundera is incomparably funny, and the novel sports some nervy images--masturbating fetuses; our human community joined in a sea of saliva; the ubiquity of spying eyes, harvesting information for profit; the human gaze itself, a marvel, jaggedly interrupted by the mechanical action of the blink. Kundera betrays a witty revulsion for the values and mores of the late 20th century.

But with sentences such as, "This is the real and the only reason for friendship: to provide a mirror so the other person can contemplate his image from the past, which, without the eternal blah-blah of memories between pals, would long ago have disappeared," the reading experience reduces to an annoyance. Perhaps this is the fault of the translator attempting a breezy, colloquial tone. But it's sloppy and careless. Still the novel's an entertainment, a good companion. Reading it is like passing an afternoon in a sidewalk café, catching up with an old friend, say, with whom one has shared youthful cynicism and diatribes against the ignominies of human behavior. One will look back on such an afternoon and remember too many Galloises smoked, too many cups of coffee, moments of intense engagement that fell, alas, into the indulgence of a "retro" ennui.

From Publishers Weekly
In his second novel written in French (after Slowness), Czech-born novelist Kundera employs spare prose in the service of a meditation on the precarious nature of the human sense of self. Recently divorced ad executive Chantal, on a vacation with her younger boyfriend, Jean-Marc, believes that she is too old to be considered attractive by other men. For Chantal, identity is defined by the perceptions of strangers. Her dreams, to the extent that they impose a "leveling contemporaneity of everything a person has ever experienced," disturb Chantal. They remind her that she has a past, when she feels that she exists only in the present, that she is who she is only at any given moment. When she returns from her vacation, she begins to receive letters from an anonymous admirer. She suspects each new man she encounters to be the mysterious scribe and fantasizes how each might perceive her. Gradually, these letters, along with a few dreams, affect how Chantal views herself and her relationship with Jean-Marc, until her feelings and identity become unrecognizable both to her lover and to herself. At the end of the book, the unnamed narrator asks: "At what exact moment did the real turn into the unreal, reality into reverie? Where was the border? Where is the border?" Kundera has long explored themes of impermanence and fluctuating identity?often to memorable effect, particularly in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and even in the more recent Immortality. His new novel lacks a certain vitality, however, perhaps because, torn from any historical or political context, Kundera's metaphysical musings aren't very engaging, or perhaps because the book lacks the ironic edge that Kundera's admirers have come to expect.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From The Washington Post

"Its allegory of love left me shivering with an ambiguous, indefinable,yet strong sense of evil."

Customer Reviews

A Lesson for Lovers.
Milan Kundera published Identity (L'Identité) after moving to France from Czechoslovakia in 1975. Kundera is perhaps best known for his 1984 novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Two things make Identity unique. It is arguably the most traditional novel Kundera has written to date, and at 176 pages in length, it is also among his shortest works. It tells the simple story of a recently divorced ad executive, Chantal, who meets her younger lover, Jean-Marc at a seaside hotel. While Chantal is out walking, Jean-Marc searches for her. She wonders why "men don't turn to look at [her] anymore," contemplating the possibility that she is now too old to be considered attractive by other men. She defines herself through the perceptions of others, until she begins receiving love notes from an anonymous admirer. Chantal hides the letters from Jean-Marc and fantasizes about each new man she encounters, wondering if he is her secret admirer. The two protagonists reveal Kundera's brilliant mind at work in contemplating whether it is ever possible to know the intimate object of one's love, further complicated by the impermanent nature of identity. While Identity may not be Kundera at his best (for that, read The Unbearable Lightness of Being), it is nevertheless worth the investment of an afternoon or late night reading a short novel by a truly unique writer. Trust me. Even when Kundera is not at his best, he is still better by far than other writers at their best.

G. Merritt

Weird
Who talks like the characters in this book? Are there really people in the world who do? And where are they so I can smack all the self-pity right out of them?!
All I could think while I read this book was, "These people need to get a hobby or something because they have way too much time on their hands."

Weak for Kundera
Years ago, I had read the first few chapters of The Unbearable Lightness of Being in a bookstore. The words stayed with me always, until years later when I actually had the opportunity to complete the reading. Identity had a different effect. I chose it for a train ride because the book I was really searching for was not in stock. Unfortunately, I'm quite disappointed.

Kundera's characters are not believable. Then again, I understand why. This is Kundera we're talking about. I believe his emphasis usually to be on what he writes about the world and psychology. Less importance is given to how it is actually told (in my mere judgment). Honestly, not only have I yet to meet anyone who converses like either Chantal or Jean-Marc, the two protagonists are also boring and not relatable. By about the 24th (or so) chapter I found myself gauging the thickness of progress I've made in the pages versus how thick the book is, and was happy to realize that Identity is a short novel.

Chantal is average. I understand the importance of using everyday subjects in writing about life's generalities and quirks, which is how I generally view Kundera as a writer. I think it can be agreed upon that he writes his personal takes on psychology through characters and in fiction form. However, Chantal isn't even pleasantly average. We know nothing about her all the way until about chapter 42 when she begins fantasizing awkward sexual situations while riding a train into England from Paris for initial reasons obscure.

The plot is boring. Basically, a woman receives admiration letters in her mailbox each morning--which, by the way, we knew were from her existing boyfriend the second we read the first instance, yet it takes half the novel to reveal this information. Whether or not Kundera wanted his readers to know more than Chantal is ambiguous to me. Perhaps her ignorance and continual fantasies about whom the author of her letters could be is more of a testament to her weakness and susceptibility as an older woman than I had previously realized. Either way, the subject is irritating, and upon hearing the fuss about her first letter, I had no idea that this was the entire plot of the novel. Then it never went away.

When the woman (Chantal) realizes that her boyfriend has been making a checkpoint of her hiding spot for these letters (and consequently realizes that he has been writing them himself), she is offended, and he confused, for the woman he believes to be his loved one would never hide silly letters from him. Thus, he questions her identity, all in a short chapter-long internal struggle leading well, nowhere. Immediately following: an awkward and unnecessary run-in with Chantal's previous family. It is Chantal, however, who instigates the couple's separation.

I get it, I get it. Chantal in the beginning is not Chantal at the end. Somewhere along the line fantasy intrudes the (mediocre) story we had been reading. Parts are clever, but 80 percent of the book is a bore, frankly. There are some good quotes, but the story is not memorable enough for my taste. I particularly liked, "That is why she dislikes dreams: they impose an unacceptable equivalence among the various periods of the same life, a leveling contemporaneity of everything a person has ever experienced; they discredit the present by denying it its privileged status" (5). Also, "That `and that's how time goes by for them' is a fundamental line. Their problem is time--how to make time go by, go by on its own, by itself, with no effort from them, without their being required to get through it themselves" (79). I'm sort of glad to be through with Identity but I'll keep reading Kundera--my impression for this one is just weak.