What's in a name? The answer, according to "I'm Not Stiller," is a tyrannical past, and the novel doesn't waste any time before beginning to argue its case. In the opening pages a man claiming to be called White is arrested while crossing the Swiss border and accused of being Anatol Ludwig Stiller, a sculptor who disappeared six years previously. But when White denies the charge and is thrown into jail, the novel is only able to develop by the most subdued kind of immediate action. It turns, instead, to reminiscence and reflection.

The result is an intelligently persuasive analysis of identity and reality, but it can hardly help being dogged by temptations which often beset fictions set in prison. The hero, with little to distract him from himself, becomes increasingly boring; and the story, with such an obvious set of equivalents for the human condition to draw...