Ignorance

by Milan Kundera

Book Overview

"Kundera once more delivers a seductive, intelligent entertainment ... [with] elegance and grace." -- Washington Post Book World

"Nothing short of masterful." -- Newsweek

A brilliant novel set in contemporary Prague, by one of the most distinguished writers of our time.

A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned 20 years earlier...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060002107
• ISBN13: 9780060002107
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Extremely confusing

I think part of the problem with this book is that it is a translation so it was very difficult to read. Don’t recommend.

You can't go home again

"Ignorance" is a story about memory: how much are we actually capable of remembering and how often do our memories fail us? In this novel, two characters encounter each other at a Paris airport during a return trip to Prague. Josef and Irena both fled the country twenty years ago during the Russian invasion. When they bump into each other at the airport, Irena immediately remembers an encounter she had with Josef some twenty years beforehand. Unfortunately, Joseph has no memory of her, although he chooses to keep that information to himself. They exchange phone numbers and agree to meet up again in Prague. Before that happens, the reader is treated to a series of flashbacks. We learn that Irena left Prague because her first husband, Martin, was wanted by the authorities. Josef was disgusted by Communism and left to start over in Denmark. Both characters have built new lives for themselves and are haunted by the memories that resurface when they return to the country they once called home. Additionally, there are many new and annoying aspects of Prague that they have to adjust to, and the old acquaintances that Josef and Irena once knew are now practically strangers to them. Milan Kundera's novel parallels the story of Odysseus. Irena and Josef have both traveled long journeys and eventually returned home. They experience many conflicting emotions and feelings of nostalgia. Eventually Irena and Josef arrange another meeting, which turns into an incredibly painful experience for both of them. There are many different themes in this book, but I think the biggest one is that people can't escape their pasts and they can't recreate their pasts, either, no matter how hard they try. "Ignorance" is a subtle but beautifully written book. Personally, I think it's incredibly sad and depressing, but the story is one that everyone will be able to relate to in some way, as we all have memories that we cherish and some that we'd give anything to forget.

Hmmmm...Nice...

Kundera's newest novel, Ignorance, follows themes similar to several of his other novels, with the concentration of this one on nostalgia, on what people believe they should be feeling at a given moment even when they are not, and on how the decisions we make at the "Age of Ignorance" (or in our late teens/early twenties) affect our lives when we come to know and understand ourselves better later in life. Intermixed with these themes is the story of Odysseus' travels in the Odyssey and how it parallels the Great Return home of each of the characters.The story is about two Czech émigrés who left during the Communist era and are now returning to Czech for the first time since the Communist regime ended in 1989. During Irena's return, she realizes how people have come to accept her as an émigré who left instead of staying loyal to her country. As she meets with her old Czech friends, she realizes the terms of their acceptance. They want to know nothing about her life outside the country. They want to amputate it, as she puts it, and by doing so, make her the same as them. Josef, on the other hand, returns to visit his family and revisits an old diary of his childhood. He marvels at the character he once was with distaste - how could he have been that creature, who seems so different from who he is now? These two émigrés end up meeting by chance to continue an old romance that neither of them accurately remembers.One of the main themes of the book is the terms and conditions by which people accept another as one of their own. They look for similarities, memories they can both reminisce together, even if they both share a different perception of what actually occurred. After all, no two people share the same memories, which fade with time. Often people don't even remember themselves for who they were, and reading old writings, they ask themselves how this writer could have possibly been them at one point. People change, but others don't see them for who they are now. Only who they once knew, or as Kundera puts it "a reality no longer is what it was when it was it cannot be reconstructed."I always walk away from a Kundera book thinking a little differently about life, and while many of the ideas in this book have been written about in greater detail in his other books, I still enjoyed it as a quick read/refresher.

A great investigation on memory

"We don't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed." What the past left behind is, however, our memory of it - inifintesimal instances of scences, selected sometimes according to our perceived importance and values; sometimes according to unknown reasons. The scary fact is that because of the selective nature of memory, each person in a relationship might possibly has a different set of scenes in our head, threaded together by our own sets of logical arugements, thus creating our own and probably different memory of the same relationship.Milan Kundera illustrated the cruelty of such a human deficiency on memory through two main characters, a man and a woman who are both Czeah emigrates. They met when they returned to their homeland after the Communist regime had collasped. The asymmetry of their memories about their homeland and about other past relatioships created a lot of heartbreaks of the people involved.A wonderful and thorough investigation on its subject, with the simplicity and elegance of his prose - this is one of the best novels I have ever read!

An impressive return to form

Kundera the master has returned at last in this gripping, concise, and moving account of a disastrous homecoming. Irena, back in Prague after years as an emigre in Paris, scarcely recognizes the city she once knew. She finds the pervasive kitsch of a burgeoning free market appalling. Meanwhile her partner, Gustaf, revels in Prague's awakening from the nightmare of communism and walks the lively streets convinced that he has finally found his city of dreams. Irena's Great Return, connected in the novel to Odysseus's rapturous homecoming in the Odyssey, confirms the "emigration nightmares" she suffered from in Paris. Aggressively cheerful former friends, gathered to welcome her back, order beer instead of drinking the fine wine she has brought them. They seem to want to cut her off from her years in Paris, to amputate the life she had there, and to join the distant past with the present. Though she resists this attempted amputation, she succumbs to the wish to revisit the past, in the form of a rendezvous with Josef, whom she flirted with briefly in a bar as a young woman. He has forgotten her, but he plays along treacherously, and their lopsided and brief affair culminates in an explosion of eroticism, followed by tears as Irena discovers that Josef means more to her than she to him. Kundera brilliantly weaves the theme of ignorance into this short novel: our identities are dependent on memory, but memory is so pitifully fragile that the self is condemned to an unbearable lightness. Josef, faithful to the memory of his dead wife, abandons Irena with terrifying detachment. His act is all the more poignant because Kundera, with is customary dexterity, has juxtaposed this scene with a parallel betrayal. Along with Irena, the reader must face the longing, and ultimate inability, to return.An ingenious architecture constructed out of philosophical meditations, etymologies, delicate observations, and moving love scenes--an impressive return to form for the Franco-Czech master.

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 lucidl