The Bourne Identity - Robert Ludlum

***** Nobody is like Jason Bourne

I must admit that Jason Bourne is one of my favourite movie characters. Having seen all the movies so far released in this series, I thought it was time to start reading the books by Robert Ludlum, because given the chronological gap between these films and the films I imagined that they were very different. And indeed it is so. Apart from a few salient points of the plot, we are faced with completely different stories result of the socio-political landscape in which they are set.

Approaching a book of the 70s (1979 to be exact) is not always easy, because immediately you notice some outdated aspects of the language and also the settings that differ from what we are used to, especially for people like me who at the time were very young and do not have first-hand memories. However, there are books like this that are timeless. Although the way of narrating undoubtedly changed over the decades, some authors are already ahead of their contemporaries. One of this is the late Ludlum, who with his first book in the series literally caught me. The character of Bourne who suffers from amnesia and is afraid of being a bad person immediately made inroads into my heart. I couldn’t help but love him. Ludlum is so good at diving into his fears and doubts that you must love this “creature” of his. Fragile and deadly, ruthless and tender, Bourne catapults us into a long adventure in Switzerland, France and the United States, where the difference between the good and the bad becomes thin, plunging the character deeper and deeper into an abyss. At every moment we fear for him, both for what may happen to him, and for what he might discover about his own past.

It’s a nice long novel that can be read in one breath, one of those you wait for throughout the day.

The Bourne Identity on Amazon.com.