Identity: A Novel

"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. . . . 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." — San Francisco Chronicle

In a narrative as intense as it is brief, a moment of confusion sets in motion a complex chain of events which forces the reader to cross and recross the divide between fantasy and reality.

Sometimes—perhaps only for an instant—we fail to recognize a companion; for a moment their identity ceases to exist, and thus we come to doubt our own. The effect is at its most acute in a couple, where our existence is given meaning by our perception of a lover, and theirs of us.

With his astonishing skill at building on and out from the significant moment, Milan Kundera has placed such a situation and the resulting wave of panic at the core of this novel. Hailed as a "a fervent and compelling romance, a moving fable about the anxieties of love and separateness" (Baltimore Sun), it is not to be missed.

Identity opens in a small hotel by the sea in Normandy where Chantal, a middle-aged advertising executive, is waiting for her lover to arrive. Jean-Marc is four years younger than she and something of a loner. When her five-year-old son died, Chantal divorced her husband, left her teaching job, and bought an apartment with the money she now earned working in an advertising agency. Jean-Marc, her lover, lives with her in Paris.aWhen Chantal and Jean-Marc return home, Chantal begins to receive letters from a mysterious admirer, signed with his initials C.D.B. He is dazzled by her beauty and follows her with the eyes of a spy and a lover. Who could this man be? Chantal suspects first one man, then another: each proves to be a false lead. Meanwhile, the letters, which Chantal hides from Jean-Marc, begin to have an effect on the couple's sex life, and then, on their love life.Identity recounts a nightmare of loss in the mode of a thriller. Chantal and Jean-Marc lose each other gradually; irritation with the other turns to anger, disgust to repulsion. When they cease to see each other through a lover's eyes, they appear to each other by turns old, ugly, ridiculous, unappealing and unworthy of trust. When Chantal dismisses Jean-Marc and departs for London, city of seduction and orgy in her imagination, the lovers lose not only each other but their very sense of self.aKundera's love story is realistic rather than romantic, candidly physical, disturbing and provocative in its wisdom about love, friendship, family, and women's bodies. The erotic charge between Chantal and Jean-Marc is utterly seductive, but it is the mystery of love that holds center stage inIdentity, Kundera's unexpected love poem to a woman.

Milan Kundera's Identity  translated from the French by Linda Asher.

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. That 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.