Product Description

Irena and Josef meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence "their memories no longer match."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #52721 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-01
• Released on: 2003-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Amazon.com Review
Bypassing the question of whether you can ever go home again, Milan Kundera's Ignorance tackles instead what happens when you actually get there. Ignorance is the story of two Czechs who meet by chance while traveling back to their homeland after 20 years in exile. Irena, who fled the country in 1968 with her now-deceased husband Martin, returns to Prague only to find coldness and indifference on the part of her former friends. Josef, who emigrated after the Russian invasion, is back in Prague to fulfill a wish of his beloved late wife. As fate would have it, the two have met before in their former lives, and the before-skirted passionate encounter is now destined to transpire. However, as in the story of Odysseus, which this novel so deliberately parallels, every homecoming brings with it a conflicting set of emotions so powerful that one has to question whether the voyage is really worth the pain. Expertly tackling the philosophical and emotional themes of nostalgia, memory, love, loss, and endurance, Kundera continues to astound readers with his masterful ability to understand and articulate issues so central to the human condition. --Gisele Toueg

From Publishers Weekly
"Would an Odyssey even be conceivable today? Is the epic of return pertinent to our own time? When Odysseus woke on Ithaca's shore that morning, could he have listened in ecstasy to the music of the Great Return if the old olive trees had been felled and he recognized nothing around him?" Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) continues to perfect his amalgam of Nietzschean aphorism and erotic tale-telling in this story of disappointing homecomings. The time is 1989 and the Communists have fallen in Prague. In the Paris airport, Irena, a Czech emigre, recognizes an ex-compatriot, Josef. More than 20 years ago, Josef almost seduced Irena in a Prague bar; the two chat and agree to meet again in Prague. Each is returning for a different reason. Irena, in 1968, fled the country with Martin, her husband, to escape the political pressure he was under. Martin is long dead, their children are grown and Irena is now being pressured to return to Prague by her Swedish lover, Gustaf, who has set up an office in the city. Josef, a veterinarian, also left the country after the Russian invasion, out of disgust. He is returning to the Czech Republic to fulfill a request from his recently deceased wife. Both discover new and annoying aspects of Prague (such as Kafka T-shirts) as well as old bitterness. When they meet, Josef neglects to tell Irena one fact: he doesn't really remember her. With elegant detachment and measured passion, Kundera once again shows himself the master of both the erudite and the carnal in this Mozartian interlude.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Further exploring the definition and possibility of nostalgia, as well as such title-worthy themes as forgetting, lightness, and identity, Kundera's latest novel (and the best of the three he has written in French) follows two middle-aged Czech ‚migr‚s who return briefly and somewhat reluctantly to their homeland in the months following the fall of communism. After several strong opening passages written in Kundera's typical blend of narrative and authorial meditation (and reminiscent of the more exciting pages of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality), Irena finds herself en route to Prague when she meets the similarly homebound Josef, with whom she'd nearly had an affair 20 years before. Irena's excitement and Josef's pretense of remembering her set up an ironic "Grand Return," rendered with compassion and humor, that features unpleasant memories, disappointment, sex born of desperation, and painful disconnections between the emigres and those they left behind. Though slightly thicker than Kundera's previous French offerings and hinting at the pre-Slowness fiction that won him a rabid following, Ignorance suffers from a seemingly hurried narrative whose end may produce in some fans a nostalgia for Kundera at his deepest and most playful. Recommended for libraries where Slowness and Identity were popular.
--Christopher Tinney, Brooklyn
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Ignorance--the revival of Kundera's great romancing
In a historical sense, it would be easy to compare Kundera's latest novel with its two immediate predecessors, Slowness and Identity. All three were penned in French, unlike his earlier, bulkier, more popular works, originally in Czech. All three are relatively short, quick reads. All three are similarly named, taking as their one-word titles general characteristics (although this was not unheard of in his Czech works: Ignorance is a direct correlative, and titles like the Unbearable Lightness of Being, while multi-worded, are in the same vein). Having just finished Ignorance, however, I think that it rises far above Slowness and Identity.

Kundera, as a romancier français, has been criticized for poverty of language. His French prose, critics have argued, is not as sumptuous and free-flowing as his native Czech. Gallimard has yet to publish a version of the original French, so I haven't had a chance to examine it firsthand, but it we are to trust translator Linda Asher (who has also done translations of his last two works), it is safe to say that Kundera is mastering his French more and more with the passage of time. Ignorance's prose is perhaps not as thick as some of Kundera's best Czech work (Life is Elsewhere and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting come to mind for their superlatively natural flow from idea to idea and richness of speech), but it is certainly lucid and not perceptibly forced.

Thematically as well, Kundera has tightened himself with Ignorance. In his grandes oeuvres, it was easier to explore depths of character and numerous themes in great detail. In the shorter format that Kundera has opted for in his French writing, that kind of exposition is not possible. Slowness and Identity (to different respective degrees) each suffered from this kind of overshooting complexity. Ignorance hones in on a few important topics, and does so in an clean, hierarchical way. The plot is simple and intriguing. The parallels with Odysseus and his Great Return to Ithaca are the next level his themeatic hierarchy. Overarching everything is, unsurprisingly, the idea of ignorance itself--what it means to be apart from something, to be out of contact, to be without knowledge, to forget. These thematic levels are delightfully undistorted in Ignorance, making for a much more clearheaded read.

Kundera gets back to basics with literary devices as well. The history of Europe, and especially of Bohemia, has been crucial in his best work, and it comes back to the forefront here. Communism and capitalism and their effects on interpersonal relationships is brought back into the fold as well. Explicating a theme via etymology is another old Kundera trick that is fruitfully taken advantage of in Ignorance.

While it's hard to capture in 200 pages what took his earlier novels 500, there is no doubt that Kundera has come back into his own with Ignorance. It's an indispensible addition to any Kundera fan's collection, and it's well organized and lucidly aesthetic enough to serve as a first exposure to Kundera as well.

Kundera's Best Work in Several Years
I was skimming the Internet and came across a site that gave a perfect description of Kundera's latest novel: the book of "leaving" and forgetting. I thought this play on Kundera's previous masterpiece was appropriate. His latest novel deals with the many forms of forgetting that occur when people emigrate. I suspect this is a topic that Kundera knows well.

The primary characters are Irena and Josef. Both left Czechoslovakia after the communists took over and found new homes in Europe. Irena went to Paris while Josef selected Denmark. The characters meet in an airport lounge as they return to their homeland, and the ignorance begins. Kundera presents ignorance, a term he loosely connects with nostalgia in the early chapters, in its many forms. As the story unfolds, we see how the main characters have forgotten much of their old life, and have forgotten that life will also go on. Respectively, details from personal diaries cannot be recalled, and the desire to question old friends about old ideas are key points of ignorance. Their friends and family suffer from much of the same (except N, who seems to be the most wise despite how others view him). This seems especially true of those who are inspired by ill will such as Josef's sister in law. Kundera even addresses the age of ignorance when we simply do not know better. This form of ignorance is conveyed through the character Milada.

Along the way, we see many of the same techniques that Kundera has become famous for. In Ignorance, we find many comparisons to Odysseus, his life with Calypso, and eventual return home to Penelope. Familiar names such Thomas Mann, Jan Skacel, and Schoenberg make appearances. And as we would expect, Kundera weaves a tale of commentary, quotes, history, and the main narrative to make his point. He moves and quotes much like a jazz musician.

At first I wondered if I would be disappointed by the same old literary techniques Kundera has been using for years. Let me answer my own concerns with a firm "no!" This is Kundera's best work in years and I enjoyed this book far more than I enjoyed Slowness or Identity. As always, Kundera makes us think. I found the narrative much more inviting than in his last two books, and the characters were much easier to connect with. I also appreciated the fact that there were no highly unusual sexual descriptions. I must admit, I was starting to worry about my favorite author after reading Slowness.

If you are a Kundera fan, then I certainly encourage you to read what I think is his best work since Immortality. If you are new to Kundera, this would certainly be an enjoyable book to read. Though not on par with Immortality, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, or Life is Elsewhere, it is an excellent work and I am very glad I took the time to read it immediately. I hope you enjoy it too.

Rich in ideas on human sensitivity and psychology
"Ignorance" is a very dense work in terms of all the ideas it raises, despite it being short. It is primarily a tale of homecoming after the many years of silent absence of those who fled the Communist regime in Czechoslavia. More than that, the work raises the fundamental question of where home actually is after many years of being away from your birthland.

Kundera beautifully captures the difference in perception between the departed and those he or she left behind. For those left behind, the person coming back is the one they knew long ago, hence the lack of questions, but the mere choice of the language in which Kundera chose to write this novel - French - symbolises how much he, the author,and the characters through him, have absorbed the French culture. His identity has evolved far beyond their perception of it.

There is one key scene in the novel when a moment of passion occurs between the two key characters. I believe it is very important to recognise that the height of this intimacy takes place in Czech and in the homeland, with a man the heroine of the novel had always dreamed of.

She uses words she has neither heard nor uttered for years, for no one would have truly understood their impact in France. The passion and the strength in the vulgarity of her words seem to express her violent need communicate in her mother tongue with someone who truly understands in all senses of the term.

These two characters are drawn to one another by their mutual departure, mutual return, mutual language and what one believes to be a mutual memory. One realises by the end of the work that memory is never quite mutual.

Whilst I found the start of the novel weak, I was quickly reassured and as absorbed by Kundera's power of perception as ever.