Identity

milan kundera

Sometimes - perhaps only for an instant - we fail to recognise 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, Kundera has placed such a situation and the resulting wave of panic at the core of the novel. 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. Profound, sad and disquieting but above all a love story, Identity provides further proof of Kundera's astonishing gifts as a novelist.

Genres fictionnovelsczech literatureliteratureclassicsphilosophycontemporaryfranceliterary fictionromance

240 pages, Hardcover Signed

First published October 29,1997

Places

paris, normandy, france,

This edition

Format: 240 pages, Hardcover Signed
Published: April 24, 1998 by HarperCollins
ISBN: 9780060192785
ASIN: 006019278X
Language: English

Characters More characters

Chantal (lidentité)

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Jean-marc (lidentité)

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About the author

milan kundera

Milan Kundera (1 April 1929 – 11 July 2023) was a Czech and French novelist. He went into exile in France in 1975, acquiring citizenship in 1981. His Czechoslovak citizenship was revoked in 1979, but he was granted Czech citizenship in 2019.

Kundera wrote in Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; people therefore consider these original works as not translations. He is best known for his novels, including The Joke (1967), The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), all of which exhibit his extreme though often comical skepticism.