{"id":26456,"date":"2020-12-30T09:59:36","date_gmt":"2020-12-30T08:59:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=26456"},"modified":"2020-12-30T09:59:38","modified_gmt":"2020-12-30T08:59:38","slug":"a-review-of-the-novel-identity-by-milan-kundera","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=26456","title":{"rendered":"A review of the novel &#8220;Identity&#8221; by Milan Kundera"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>The only other work that I&#8217;ve read by this Czech novelist &#8211; who now writes in French &#8211; was &#8220;The Unbearable Lightness Of Being&#8221;. But that was over 30 years ago and I confess that I did not understand much of the imagery in that work. Three lockdowns into the covid crisis of 2020, I was looking for something short and &#8220;Identity&#8221; is only 150 pages, so i gave Kundera another chance. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Narratively the novella is simple: a short period of time in the relationship between a middle-aged French couple called Chantal and Jean-Marc. But things are never straightforward with Kundera. There is a lot of dreaming here, some of it signalled, but most of it uncertain. There are some interesting ideas but overall I found the opaqueness irritating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The only other work that I&#8217;ve read by this Czech novelist &#8211; who now writes in French &#8211; was &#8220;The Unbearable Lightness Of Being&#8221;. But that was over 30 years ago and I confess that I did not understand much of the imagery in that work. Three lockdowns into the covid crisis of 2020, I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26456"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26457,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26456\/revisions\/26457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}