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Summary: Kundera is the BEST when it comes to women characters
Review: I started reading Kundera as a teenager. He helped me shape my idea of the world, my idea of the self, of love and disenchantment. I am still awed by his observations: the mirror, the blink, motherhood, complacency and, of course, Identity. Our many selves -a classic subject, and in this book, our many selves in the blinking eye of the beloved.The pace, time and flow of the novel are perfect. The ending disturbing -postmodern. Reminded me of Italo Calvino's -Si una noche de invierno un viajero... He is still the BEST when it comes to women characters. He writes of women like a woman -that is the best compliment I can give. The thing about the dreams, oh, it is so true. As to the flushes, I still don't know.
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Summary: From The Wall Street Journal
Review: "....curiously absorbing, with a melancholy charm that lingers past its last apercu."
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Summary: Kundera in decline?
Review: After being consistently so very good in his earlier novels (peaking with Immortality)), Identity and Slowness have been quite disappointing. It's worth reading, it wasn't a poor novel by any means, but if you expect anything like the Kundera of old, lower your expectations a bit.
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Summary: The gradual decline of an aging author
Review: Kundera continues probing the well-worn territory he has investigated throughout his career; yet he seems with this most recent novel to have lost interest in telling stories, in developing characters, in reminding us why "The Joke" and "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" were such important works. Here he is tiresomely didactic, without the heft of his far more compelling essays, repetitive for the sake of being repetitive (how many times must we be told the menopausal Chantal was "flushed" and "red"?), and discursive without the comprehensible presence of his generally roving mind. Too, I felt that Kundera was going through the motions, writing tired sex scenes without any clear purpose. Throughout the 51 chapterettes, it was nearly impossible for this reader to be unaware that Kundera was practicing what he has preached about musical variations, especially his love of Stravinsky. One gets the impression that these variations are here for no other literary reason that to fulfill his promise, to do what he told us earlier he would. Finally, Linda Asher's translation seems mostly acceptable--graceful, careful, precise--though I can't help thinking we really must be losing something in the translation. Sadly, I fear we aren't.
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Summary: WHERE IS THE POETRY and THE POWER of my BEST writer?
Review: I love Milan Kundera,if I'm now a french writer,it'because,i wanted to xrite as him,with a power of desillusion,a new novel composition,a great poetry.Ah dear Milan,dear master,where is the vigour of your old books?The reading of "the identity"gave me an unbearable nostalgia on a distant past,an epoch while i lived only for MILAN KUNDERA
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Summary: Hopefull.....
Review: i hope this is better than slowness. i hope linda asher is as fine a translator as peter kussi.
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Summary: Kundera does not betray his admirers
Review: This book was published in icelandic in october, even before it appeared in french. It's title was decided in cooperation with the author and it means something like "unclear borderline". And that seems to be what Kundera is writing about, this vague difference between reality and not-reality, and besides how completely mistaken we can be about our own identity or that of others. I love his relaxed style so I enjoyed this book as I always do - I would have liked it to be longer though - and one criticism: the ending is ... well, I would have expected something more original.
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Summary: Milan Kundera: A Weight All Readers Should Carry
Review: Although Milan Kundera's work, Identity, was a New York Times notable book, critics internationally have accused him of breaking a so-called reader-writer contract in which the completion of plot is meant to finish the presentation of character. This type of criticism does not befit a renowned writer who convinced the world years ago that the duty of a novelist, at least in his own case, was to teach readers to comprehend life as a question rather than as an answer and to understand fiction as an idea rather than a story. In his heyday people enjoyed the challenge of wading through his lengthy digressions on the evolution of the meaning of words, the way he interrupts his narrative time and time again to return to the discussion of certain themes such as "lightness" and "heaviness" in his most famous novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
But just as heaviness, "which pins us to the ground but is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment," is often a gift, so too is the weight of Kundera's work, even in his novel, Identity. Besides the fact Identity was originally written in French as opposed to Kundera's first language, Czech in which he wrote his previous works, there is no discrepancy in talent between this book and his earlier, more popular, one. Critics, however, are asking such questions as "has 'being' grown so unbearably light that Kundera can't even write about it anymore." My answer is "No." In Identity, Kundera courageously invites his readers to weigh the notion of human identity and what it means both in a community and in one-on-one romantic relationship. This novel portrays one couple-Chantal, who has recently divorced her husband after the death of her five year-old child, and Jean-Marc. The story, or better yet, Kundera's quandary about identity begins at a hotel where the two lovers are vacationing. Half-jokingly, Chantal remarks to Jean-Marc, "Men don't turn to look at me anymore," which prompts Jean-Marc to send her anonymous letters. Although the letters at first serve to inflame their lovemaking, ultimately they backfire into what Kundera calls "a shameful objectification that is a threat to all of us in the intrusive modern era," a topic that the author returns to time and time again. In essence, Jean-Marc projects an idealized identity onto Chantal and is deflated when she contradicts it. And Chantal, in turn, is deflated when she projects an oppressor's identity onto Jean-Marc, the only man who has ever tried not to oppress her.
No summary of the plot, however, can truly express the complex philosophical question that embodies each character's paradoxical actions and feelings. One day, for instance, while Chantal is eating lunch with Jean-Marc she is suddenly overcome by "a feeling of unbearable nostalgia for him." She wonders how this could happen in his presence, and decides it can "if you glimpse a future where the beloved is no more." At this moment, she thinks of her dead child and is flooded with happiness since it is his death that has made her presence at Jean-Marc's side "absolute." She does not, however, disclose these thoughts to Jean-Marc for fear that he would view her as a monster.
"What people keep secret is the most common, the most ordinary, the most prevalent thing, the same thing everybody has," insecurity, loneliness, and anxiety, Jean-Marc muses later on. Yet, as one would come to expect, Kundera's twist on this simple thought is far more profound and open-ended. We come to see that by keeping these types of feeling to ourselves we are concealing our communality, our humanity, which conversely causes us to lose our individual identity as both Chantal and Jean-Marc eventually do within their relationship.
Given Kundera's previous works, it should come as no surprise that the end of Identity asks readers to consider the possibility that none of the previously described events in Jean-Marc's and Chantal's relationship are real. This device of forcing readers to take on the responsibility of thought is not a literary cop out, as some critics would recently have us believe. It is instead Kundera's philosophy on the function of a novel coming to life as it always has in his work. Since he has never before provided definitive endings, the real cop out would've been for Kundera to answer in absolute terms all the issues raised by his characters in the narrative. "Chantal has seized dominance and backed her author into a corner. He cannot save her, yet lacks the toughness to destroy her," complains one critic in a review that obviously overlooks Kundera's entire reason for writing. In all of Kundera's work it is our job as readers to ponder a character's fate in terms of our own understanding of the human experience.
Keeping in mind Kundera's literary consistency in the last decade, the change in the attitudes of his critics is baffling. Kundera, however, in his typically insightful way has undoubtedly hit the nail on the head as to why it may have come about when he states in an interview, "People nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noise of perceived human certainties. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead." Hopefully readers will come to realize that by killing the importance of Kundera's unique idea of fiction we are doing ourselves a horrible disservice. Of course, literature that requires us to think not only of the book but also of our own lives drops a certain responsibility on the reader, but it is well worth the extra energy. After all, if we refuse to spend time considering how this modern era has affected our view of identity, how can we say so definitively that "light" literature, which asks no questions, is any more splendid than Kundera's form of "heavy" idea-based literature?
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Summary: Good stuff!
Review: Few books really knock me over, especially lately. The novel "Fight Club" did it for me, as did the powerful and stunning short story collection "The Children's Corner" by Jackson McCrae. So I was pleasantly surprised when "Identity" did the same thing. Kundera managed to get us sucked in a labyrinth of emotions and question the very nature of our feelings as well as face our inner demons through the quest of Chantal, a middle-aged woman, for love and the essence of life. A very important book, full of ideas.
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Summary: Nearly poetic
Review: I liked this book for its intelligence and for its simplicity of structure. I didn't like that I found it, by the end, anti-climactic -- I felt no revelation about identity, lack of identity, meaning or lack of meaning with respect to identity. The book's intelligence was compelling enough, though, as was its plot. Until the final chapters. Simplicity, brevity and internal consistency turned from deft continuity to a scattered unrealism that was both at odds with the book's tenor and ultimately led not to knowing, not to not-knowing, nor to anything fully realized. However, because of its smart writing and compelling theme, I am genuinely happy to have read it. Some prose is beautiful and interesting enough to be a pleasure in itself and "Identity," for me, is an example of such prose. In that sense: if the medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan wrote, then it did fulfill. Ironically or not, then, "Identity" itself lacks an ultimate crucial identity.
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