Book Reviews - Review 169

A portrayal of a love relationship between two needy but independent people - familiar Kundera territory. As far as I could tell, the question the novel tries to ask is: what makes a lover special? Is it their appearance, their character, or simply the fact that we call them 'ours'? An interesting subject, but Kundera's treatment of it is strangely half-hearted. The old 'essayistic' style is largely absent, and as a result this seems a very conventional novel compared with The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Immortality. Conventional, that is, except for the wilful blurring of dream and reality, a device that I couldn't make any sense of at all except - and perhaps I'm being too harsh here - as an exuse for the narrative's fundamental incoherence.

Since my French is rather rusty, it's possible that I didn't pick up on some hidden brilliance in this book. But I still can't get over the feeling that Kundera said everything he had to say in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and that he has struggled since then to find new material, both narrative and philosophical, to feed his work with; which would certainly explain the brevity of his recent novels.