Volume 45, Number 12 · July 16, 1998
On the Love Boat
By Michael Wood
Identity
by Milan Kundera, translated by Linda Asher
HarperFlamingo, 160 pp., $22.00
The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto
by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Edith Grossman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 259 pp., $23.00
A Lover's Almanac
by Maureen Howard
Viking, 270 pp., $24.95
The Red Hat
by John Bayley
St. Martin's, 192 pp., $21.95
Milan Kundera's new novel, Identity, written in French and marked at its end as 'completed in France, Autumn 1996,' reads like a modest commentary on a famous page in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Charles Swann's love for Odette de Crécy, entering its unhappiest phase, is described as an illness, in which physical desire, and even Odette's person, play only a small part. Swann can scarcely recognize her in a photograph, can't connect her face with his pain—'as though suddenly we were to be shown a detached, externalized portrait of one of our own maladies, and we found it bore no resemblance to what we are suffering.' The switch from Swann to us is striking; our identification with his condition is swiftly taken for granted. Proust's narrator then, even more strikingly, relates love and death, not, he says, because of any of the 'so vague' resemblances which are 'always' discussed, but because both make us interrogate further, interroger plus avant, 'the mystery of personality.' Who is it we love, and who are we, in love or out of it?
Review, 6394 words
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