The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Identity by Milan KunderaPaul Maliszewski
Milan Kundera. Identity. Trans. Linda Asher. Harper Flamingo, 1998. 168 pp. $22.00.
Chantal and Jean-Marc take a holiday. After a series of both comic and bitter misunderstandings, but most of all French as in farce, the two grow apart. Everything they interpret, they mistake: politeness for protectiveness, caring for manipulation, and so on. In any other Kundera novel the two would be among a number of couples, but in Identity they are alone. Even the narrator abandons them, to think thoughts a Kundera narrator would think. I counted one small narrative intrusion, at the end, rounding out what reads like an especially wicked, ironic fable minus the moralizing.
The reader of Kundera’s longer novels inhabits large houses of fiction. The rooms are furnished in various styles, with characters coming forward or blending into the wallpaper as needed. Identity and the 1995 novel Slowness are, by comparison, single rooms. They are chamber works to the earlier symphonies. Where the other novels are in parts (five of the novels have seven), the two newest novels are divided into fifty-one short chapters. Determining what accounts for this aesthetic isn’t easy. It may be language: Kundera wrote both in French and the other novels in Czech. Or it may be expectations. In an interview Kundera says although he admires Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, he cannot admire its endless length, comparing it to a castle too big to be seen. Since Kundera’s short novels are pessimistic works, soaked in anger but leavened by irony, and written against the fate of the self caught in the epidemic of speed, the crush of boredom, and the culture of dissatisfaction, it may be that Kundera sees his seven-section symphonies as exceeding our limits. A third possibility exists: the two newest novels are part of an on-going body of shorter works, a suite of fictional rooms, each centered on an existential question—what happens to the self; first in the age of speed, then when it’s stripped of identity? [Paul Maliszewski]