Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
Arresting. In its brevity and unity of plot it surpasses even his previous book, Slowness.
Washington Post Book World
Its allegory of love left me shivering with an ambiguous, indefinable, yet strong sense of evil.
Baltimore Sun
A fervent and compelling romance, a moving fable about the anxieties of love and separateness.
Washington Post Book World
Its allegory of love left me shivering with an ambiguous, indefinable, yet strong sense of evil.
Wall Street Journal
Curiously absorbing, with a melancholy charm.
Washington Post Book World
Its allegory of love left me shivering with an ambiguous, indefinable, yet strong sense of evil.
San Fransisco Chronicle
A novel of posessive passion. . . gets us turning the pages in excitement and alarm, Kundera's wit keeps us turning them to the very end.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
Arresting....In its brevity and unity of p lot it surpasses even his previous book, Slowness.
— The New York Times
Wall Street Journal
Curiously absorbing, with a melancholy charm that lingers past its last apercu.
San Francisco Chronicle
Kundera, master of the twosome, finds erotic and existential threads everywhere in daily behavior. Like his previous books, Identity is a cluster of jeweled observations. Very French, very Kundera. But Identity has a special charm: suspense..[It] gets us turning the pages in excitement and alarm, and Kundera's wit keeps us turning them to the very end, through love's dark night of the soul and out again into a precarious sunlight.
Baltimore Sun
A fervent and compelling romance, a moving fable about the anxieties of love and separateness.
Boston Globe
[Kundera's] way of imagining himself into the minds of women in a state of love and desire is remarkable.
Times Literary Supplement
A twisting, teasing labyrinthine story of detection.
Washington Post Book World
Its allegory of love left me shivering with an ambiguous, indefinable, yet strong sense of evil.
Publishers Weekly
- Publisher's 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 identityoften 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. (May)
NY Times Book Review
Insightful..Kundera lucidly discloses the psychological obsessions of the two lovers and shows how these obsessions lead to repeated miscommunications between them.
Time Out New York
A beguiling meditation on the illusions of self-image and desire....meant to be savored, pleasurably and thoughtfully, like a fine cognac.
The Boston Globe
[Kundera's] way of imagining himself into the minds of women in a state of love and desire is remarkable.
Times Literary Supplement
A twisting, teasing labyrinthine story of detection.
Washington Post Book World
Its allegory of love left me shivering with an ambiguous, indefinable, yet strong sense of evil.
Kirkus Reviews
Further evidence of the decline into stentorian self-parody of the Czech virtuoso who once (ages ago, it now seems) produced such wonders as Laughable Loves (1974) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984). It's a portrait of the relationship between Chantal, who has suffered the death of her young son and left her dull-witted husband, and her younger lover Jean-Marc. The "story" is the progress of their increasing self-consciousness and unease with each other, fuelled by continuing echoes of separation and death (in a TV program Chantal overhears, in Jean-Marc's hospital visit to a dying friend), meandering thoughts on the subjects of boredom and our imperfect ability to know others, and especially a series of anonymous letters Chantal receives from an unknown admirer. His identity is soon revealed (and, in any case, isn't much of a secret) to us, though not to Chantal, who nevertheless becomes persuaded "that she has been living locked away by love, as Jean-Marc realizes "that his deepest vocation is to be a marginal person" excluded from the totality of his mistress's life and relationships. At the close, an unidentified "septuagenarian" (perhaps our author?) recalls Chantal to "Life!,þ and the story collapses in self-reflexive contortions as we're informed that all we've read is "treacherous fantasyþ. The worst featureþand it is by no means the only flawþof this diaphanous r‚cit is that its characters' overwrought introversion justifies their creator's indulgence in the tedious discursive commentary of which he has grown increasingly fond. Kundera seems to think he's Arthur Schnitzler or Casanova. Others may think he's Sidney Sheldon with a postgraduatedegree in comp lit. If we give him the Nobel Prize, perhaps he'll subdue his mandarin ego and go back to writing novels. Anyway, isn't it pretty to think so?
