Missing persons is the topic for Milan Kundera's new novel. Kundera, with microscopic scrutiny, shows us how, through several episodes over a few weeks in the lives of his characters, a loved one can be lost to us even without actually disappearing. This absenteeism in love is a sign of the other, the unknowable that is the distance between people. Kundera's novel also touches on memory and the use of friends; as a corollary to the missing we get the force of anonymity; there is a remarkable discussion of the different interpretations of the blinking eye running throughout the book.

For all of the talent shown in this novel, however, this is not Kundera's best. It reads like an intriguing and expanded story from Laughable Loves, but lacks the bolstering that comes from being part of a collection. It does not have the power of The Unbearable Lightness of Being or The Farewell Waltz, and in comparison, the characters of Identity are stock. Their flatness may be due, almost contrary to common sense, to the fact that Kundera focuses almost exclusively on the two main characters. The reader sees perhaps too obviously the reactions that one character sets off in the other.

Nonetheless, it is a Kundera novel. Faithful readers of Kundera will not be surprised by the narrator's entrance at the conclusion of the story, though they may notice his absence in the body of it. Here he returns his narrator's voice to the peripheral margin he occupied in earlier works (after his experiment in Immortality in which he brought the narrator to center-stage). The narrator's placement is perfect, considering the novel's theme of absence.