I saw and enjoyed the movie years ago but the story never gripped me enough to make me hurry to read the book. Now that I have, I'm glad that I did.

First, its a great story. It's fast paced and has that energy common to techno-thrillers. Ludlam can certainly hold his own in an arena I'd previously thought of as populated by Tom Clancy alone. The locales and the situations are captivating and the action and tension are riveting.

This book's strength (and perhaps its weakness) is the amnesia/mystery that we watch being unraveled. Strength in that it's a great plot, but it's a bit of a weakness as the amnesiac main character keeps us from forming an immediate attachment to the character. He's fascinating, but even he admits, Cain is not really easily lovable. Of course after the first 50 pages or so we do care and the story gets more interesting.

This is not my favorite genre but it hooked me nonetheless, I'll most likely pick up and read the next installment but again, I feel no great need to do so immediately.

Last book of 2021! Happy New Year to those of you using the Gregorian calendar!

3.0 Stars
I love the movie so I was interested to check out the source material. This is an engaging page turning thriller but honestly I think I prefer the movie adaptation. The "romance" in this novel was so laughably toxic.

A wild ride that gets a bit long in the book's last quarter. The ending is fire, with a cliffhanger leading to the next book.

The entire enigma of Jason Bourne was well done, and I enjoyed that there was a bit of a romance woven into the intrigue.

Solid 4 Stars.

In some ways it reminded me of my life, not through the eyes of an amnesiac, but when I was used by intelligence agencies without knowing who I worked for as noted in Beyond Enkription which you should like if you are a Jason Bourne fan. For more about me please see https://everipedia.org/wiki/bill-fair... and of course https://theburlingtonfiles.org.

I’ve seen the movie ages ago, but luckily my memory is like Swiss cheese so I didn’t remember much. That made reading it a blast. There was tons of action and suspense, just my cup of tea!

Robert Ludlum is a terrible terrible writer of dialogue and had a terrible style.

The man can, however, tell a story. That is why his books are translated very well into great action movies.

but if i have to read one more line of the "oh john! oh marsha' bullcrap in his novels, i swear i will stab my eyes out with a fork. man on man, if that woman goes on anymore in her inner monologue about "that poor man! he couldn't stand it! not knowing who he was! and now he was . . . . blah blah bippity bladdy blah" i'd burn a book for the first time.

Good fireplace material if you were trapped in a cabin in a blizzard.

This book was so different from the movie ! ( But then again when are they ever the same ? ) I really enjoyed the story , I now wish the movie had kept a few more things in it. I thought marie was a much better character. I love the way it ended.
HOWEVER : There is a TON of swearing ! And I do mean a TON !
That was very disapointing . :( but, I now have a fully edited book if someone wants to swap/sell with me. :)
I just got a black pin coverd the words. I would have given this story a 5 if it were not for the editing .

إذا كنت تبحث عن رواية جوسسة
... تدور أحداثها في فترة الحرب الباردة
...رواية حيث لم تغزو التكنولوجيا حياة العامة
...حيث تستعمل الشخصيات الهواتف العمومية
...(حيث من الصعب الحصول على صورة أحد ما (ان لم يكن مستحيلا
حيث الكثير من التشويق و الحركة
...مع قصة حب تبدأ في ظروف جد معقدة
فلن تجد أفضل من هذه الرواية
جزء أول مبشر جدا :-)

After finishing the book, I can totally understand why The Bourne Identity has attained such a cult-status among it's readers. In fact out of my 32 friends who have the book in their shelves in GR, 18 have given it a 4/5 star rating. To begin with, it is a pretty decent thriller. It has an amazing start, a couple of interesting characters, a protagonist you can root for, fast twists and turns and some powerful action sequences.

The premise really impressed me. A nameless man with highly unusual skills to kill, defend and protect wakes up without a memory in a strange island off the French coast, soon to realize that there are many who want him dead. To know how to save himself, he must first rediscover his identity. Thus begins a frantic race against time to understand, cope and deal with every startling clue that he uncovers, while fighting against his untraceable enemies.

However, there were a few things in the novel which so totally did not work for me, and compelled me to knock off two stars. Firstly, would a girl really fall in love with a man who held her hostage, and manhandled her just because he later saved her life? I mean of course it can happen, and is even highly probable, but it just seemed a bit too contrived, a little too sudden. The build up could've been better. Also the fact that the hero had to find a girlfriend who was a financial whiz-kid, when he was in desperate need of one, just seemed a little too easy. Too convenient. Am I nitpicking? Maybe. But, when I read a thriller, too many coincidences just makes the story lame. Another fact which I noticed was that the standard of writing was inconsistent. At parts they were patchy, incoherent, and had to be skimmed through/re-read(depends on your patience) to be comprehended.

And so I draw my conclusions that Robert Ludlum has a pretty good imagination and knows how to hold the reader's attention, but is not much gifted as a writer. Still, just because of the story line I will definitely continue with the trilogy. Lets see how it turns out. As for now, I would strongly ask you to give this book a try, for at the end of the day, I cant deny that it is a pretty entertaining read!

Had to give up on this one. The story is incredibly different than the films and showing its age. Marie, an accomplished economist, literally threw her life away for a man who threatened, hit her, and terrified her, and then they fell in love in six pages and she called him darling a hundred times—seriously “My darling, my darling, don’t let them do this to you,” she says in an empty Parisian hotel room, and screaming at the window on the next page. People absolutely do that.

It was a ridiculous romance to squeeze into an otherwise interesting spy novel, but even with the otherwise solid plot I just couldn’t get into it. All the conversations in particular didn’t sound remotely human. The book made a great starting point for the awesome movies but I much prefer those.

Wow, by the end of chapter one I was already thinking this was one of the most ludicrous novels I've ever read. And given that I've been reading through a suspense novel recommendation list, with such doozies as Vince Flynn's Term Limits, Brad Thor's The Lions of Lucerne and Matthew Reilly's Ice Station that means Ludlum is setting a really low, low.

OK, there weren't any giant mutant seals at least, but right in the first pages our hero, later to be known as Jason Bourne, is shot multiple times. With one of those shots his "skull is ripped open." Not merely cracked, mind you, but ripped open. Bourne falls into the sea...and survives. But wait, it gets better! The fishermen who pick him up take him to this alcoholic doctor. Taking lots of liquids and starches to sober up, this doctor does brain surgery on Bourne! At his home! (Oh, and btw, if my use of italics and exclamation points irritate you--you're not going to last long with Ludlum--he uses them as if he's paid for each use.)

And then? Bourne wakes up with amnesia. But wait! Somehow in the midst of his solo brain surgery, the good doctor noticed the microchip in Bourne's hip with clues to his identity!

All I can say is, if after a first chapter like that one you continued reading, you got what you deserved. Several hours of your life you're going to wish you could get back.