Succumbing to Lightness
MORTON, BRIAN
Succumbing to Lightness Identity By Milan Kundera Translated by Linda Asher Harper Flamingo. 168 pp. $23.00. Reviewed by Brian Morton Author, "Starting Out in the Evening" In the opening...
...Chantal hides the letters in her wardrobe without ever mentioning them to Jean-Marc...
...Even if that doesn't prove to be the case, however, even if his best books are behind him, we can only be thankful that he remains so productive...
...They aren't fathers, they're just daddies, which means: fathers without a father's authority...
...She angrily concludes that he has launched an elaborate scheme to get rid of her: He is planning to seize upon her reaction to the letters as proof that she is capable of being unfaithful to him, and use this as a justification for leaving her...
...She buys a new nightgown, and begins to give herself with more abandon to their lovemaking...
...In the books he has written since, Kundera has no longer troubled to create characters who matter to the reader...
...It also seems important to make it plain that only a writer of genius could have turned the situation to account: Many Czech writers suffered under Communism, but there was just one Kundera...
...Jean-Marc, instead of being happy, is plunged into gloom: He believes she is more excited by the admiration of the fictitious letterwriter than by his own love...
...During the late 1970s and the '80s, for many readers Kundera was the most important fiction writer alive...
...Though he would bridle when reviewers referred to him as a political novelist—he liked to protest that his books were simply love stories—his plots were always set against the background of the cataclysm that his country had suffered...
...In no sense was he "lucky" to have come of age in a totalitarian society...
...Still, it feels slight, and not simply because of its brevity...
...What has changed...
...the man's expression was meek, solicitous, smiling, a bit embarrassed, and endlessly willing to bend over the child, wipe its nose, soothe its cries...
...Reviewed by Brian Morton Author, "Starting Out in the Evening" In the opening pages of Milan Kundera's new novel, a woman named Chantal is waiting for her lover at a seaside hotel in Normandy...
...That is the plot, but it is not the main attraction here...
...Every cluster of them presented the same pattern: the man was pushing a stroller with a baby in it, the woman was walking beside him...
...In Identity, Chantal and Jean-Marc come to life only through their reflections—and the reflections of each are for the most part indistinguishable from those of the other, or from those of the narrator...
...Yet it remains true that his recent fiction is missing yesterday's former heft...
...Although of late the titles of his novels appear to suggest each one is exploring a single subj ect (Immortality, Slowness), their appeal is that they are in effect guided tours of the author's mind at the time he was writing them...
...I'm not sure what Identity actually has to say about identity in the end...
...His characters were often trying to live out simple love stories, but politics kept getting in the way, and this conflict provided the gravity and dramatic tension that is absent today...
...It sometimes seems as if major innovations in the form are no longer possible...
...perhaps novels like Slowness and Identity will someday be seen as early drafts of great French-language works of his later years...
...In his two great works Kundera gave us fascinating ideas on subjects ranging from kitsch to Communism, from the ambiguities of political activism to the ambiguities of love—but he also gave us indelible characters...
...It is merely a sort of pretext, an occasion for the narrator to ruminate about such matters as love, aging, boredom, physical desire...
...Could the man transformed into a baby-tree still turn to look at a strange woman...
...The idea strikes Chantal as funny and puts her in a good mood...
...Perhaps Kundera has further masterpieces ahead of him...
...One admires Kundera for his esthetic and intellectual restlessness, his refusal to spend his entire career going over the same ground...
...But now that he is no longer meditating about the tragedy of the Czech experience—now that he is simply writing love stories—his books have succumbed to the very lightness he analyzed so devastatingly in The Unbearable Lightness of Being...
...She thinks about how difficult it would be to flirt with one of them...
...His two masterpieces of that period, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, brought the art of the novel to a new peak...
...When her lover, Jean-Marc, arrives, Chantal tells him, "Men don't turn to look at me anymore...
...She thinks to herself: I live in a world where men will never rum to look at me again...
...This produces the first of many misunderstandings...
...The three books he has written over the past 10 years have been much less substantial...
...In his earlier work, he had a large and tragic subject: the subjugation of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union...
...Kundera demonstrated that this is not so...
...It seems important to make it plain that one would not wish such a hellish subject on any writer...
...Sabina, Tereza and Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Tamina in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting—no one who has encountered these characters is likely to forget them...
...So after they return to Paris he begins to send her unsigned love letters from a secret admirer, designed to persuade her that she is still as attractive as ever...
...Rather, there is a sense of its being undernourished, underimagined a sketch of a novel and not the novel itself...
...In those two books philosophical and political speculations were combined seamlessly with the traditional virtues of fiction...
...witty epigrams...
...Like most of Kundera's recent fiction, Identity is an essay in disguise that is somehow both elegant and meandering...
...a keen eye for the absurd side of erotic life...
...She takes a walk along the shore and observes the tourists...
...He misinterprets her remark as a lament for her youth, a "red light signaling that [her] body's gradual extinction has begun," and resolves to do something to reassure her...
...Wouldn't the babies hanging off his back and his belly start howling about the carrier's disturbing movement...
...There may be another reason why Kundera's recent fiction lacks urgency...
...Kundera is one of the few major writers of our time, and his lesser works are of interest too...
...Chantal, after a period of ambivalence —of not knowing whether to be flattered or annoyed by having an unknown man watching her—realizes the writer must be Jean-Marc...
...Chantal reflects that "men have daddified themselves...
...The slim volume, his second (after Slowness) to have been written in French, affords us many of the pleasures we have come to expect from Kundera: clean, spare prose...
...His people now seem like puppets, held up negligently by a ventriloquist who has grown so indifferent to his art that he does not even try to hide the fact that it is he who is speaking...
Vol. 81 • June 1998 • No. 8
