Customer Reviews

Ignorance

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read this book at the recommendation of my father, who immigrated to the U.S. from Hungary in the 1960s. He told me that it expressed what he felt when he paid his old home a visit a few years ago. I appreciated the author's words regarding the returning Czech immigrants in the book. They return home to a country that is much changed from what they remember. At least one of them realizes that he's been missing a country that no longer exists. Even his native language has come to sound strange to his ears. The reactions of other people in the book were interesting too - no one in the home country asks their returning friends or relatives about their lives in their adopted countries. I remember that same kind of strange silence when I visited Hungary with my family. The author's words ring extremely true. This isn't the type of book I normally read and I appreciated learning from the author's point of view. I had trouble distinguishing between his characters, though. They are not fleshed out, and the plot is slight. It's a book more about the feelings and observations of an emigrant/immigrant. That's very valuable, but I suspect the audience for the work is small. I definitely recommend the book.

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 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.

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.

This is a fine return to form for Kundera. His two previous novels, "Slowness" and "Identity" suffered from authorial interjections that bordered on being esoteric, and at worst, willful and pretentious. Kundera has used such narrative technique ever since he started writing, but with his 'French novels', these narrative intrusions seemed trivial and off-putting.

Although written in French, "Ignorance" retrieves the thematic verve of Kundera's early great Czech novels. The book deals with themes of nostalgia, memory, and the Great Return, which were also featured prominently in Kundera's earlier novels. The narrative asides that seemed so grating and annoying in his two previous novels seem powerfully relevant here. Even the usual Nietzschean philology that Kundera does that usually rubs me the wrong way is intriguing and meaningful, when in the beginning of the novel Kundera contemplates the word 'nostos' and introduces the theme of nostalgia by the way of Odysseus, then our main characters, Josef and Irena.

Both Josef and Irena are emigrants, returning to Czechoslovakia. Both have lost their spouses. Irena has taken up a partner since, but Josef resolves to live as if his wife hasn't really died. The parts describing Josef coping with his wife's death have haunting, lyrical power that's been absent from Kundera's recent, emotionally aloof offerings. They are utterly moving, and even when read apart from the whole novel (Granta #78 excerpted Josef parts of the novel into a short story), it carries an emotional resonance that won't easily detach itself from your mind.

The climax of the novel comes towards the end when Josef and Irena meet. All the themes of the novel come together in the aftermath of this meeting, and although it seems typical for Kundera to find an insight to everything in sexual politics, the emotional attach/detachments of these characters seem so real, the recurrent mannerism of the author becomes a secondary issue.

The book is slight, compared to Kundera's Czech novels. It is not to say the issues dealt within this book are slight by any means. In "The Art of the Novel", and other interviews, Kundera has explicitly stated his disenchantment with the big novel form, preferring a form that is more concise and comic. With this novel, the concision only crystallises and accentuates the ideas explored by Kundera.

Kundera does a fine job of revisiting the old themes of his earlier works, but in the time since those books, many writers have traversed in the same thematic grounds of memory and nostalgia more poignantly, with more immediacy. (One writer, that comes to mind, is the recently deceased W.G. Sebald.) But all it all, this novel is an elegant contemplation by a master of contemporary fiction.

Milan Kundera continues his exploration of the most basic of human emotions in this brief novel that addresses how we deal with memory, internalization of fear of failure, and fear of commitment. Though the story of IGNORANCE revolves around two people who return to Prague after an extended exile from their homeland due to the seemingly constant political upheavals and displacements of the 20th century global events, the core of this story encourages us to examine our fantasies of our past, our idealized childhood and first love experiences, and our vulnerabilities about aging, about returning to the 'home' we have altered to such a degree by distance and memory conflicts. Kundera manages to capture the fragile spaces in his characters' minds and psyches and in doing so he holds a mirror up to his readers. What were our formative years really like? Can we recapture idealized pasts by returning to them? The sad answers are 'no', we can't go home again. Life and our accompanying maturity alters everything - places, old comrades, old loves, old hopes and pain. Though this book is a quick read, easily an evening's read, it distills many sharply focused matters of life as we have lived it and life as we continue to grow. This is thought-provoking book, well written, and a must for lovers of Kundera's style.

"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.

This book challenges the Unbearable Lightness of Being for the place of my absolute favorite Kundera novel. Never before has a book left me breathless, shaking, and at an utter loss for words. The writing is the most tender, and the most cruel that I have encountered thus far. Please, read this; you won't regret it!

"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!

Ignorance is a novel that exposes the weakness and fallibility of our memory. Milan Kundera evokes the question to what extent our poor memory renders us ignorant.

Irena and Josef chanced to encounter one another at Paris airport while returning to their homeland, which they had pertinaciously abandoned twenty years ago during the Russian invasion. Both of them chose to be unlawful exiles with whom families dare not to keep in contact. Irena, then pregnant with her second child, fled with her husband Martin to Paris and soon led a poverty-stricken life as a widow until she became Gustaf's mistress. Irena instantly recognized Josef at the first sight of him: they had met at a friend's party in Prague some 20 years ago. She had regretted parting with him after the party and was stricken with a wound that never healed.

Josef fled the country when he was a medical student in veterinary medicine. Unlike his brother who succumbed to the Communist reign and denied his own convictions to demonstrate support, Josef could not bear to see his country enslaved and humiliated. He settled down in Copenhagen, got married, became a vet. Not a day passed without Josef's reminiscing his deceased wife. He loved her even more, in a melancholy and memorial way, and respected all her customs, such as taking care every chair, vase, and lamp was where she had liked it.

While our protagonists sighed at the drastic changes of their once-familiar homeland and the wiping out of landmarks, a more subtle but inevitable issue emerged. Their rueful recollections and nostalgia caught up with them, in fragments, fear, and regret. However obdurately and diligently they tried to shield off past memories and put off paltry values of the past lives, the pang of regret and sense of loneliness never spared them. Irena always felt emigration was an irreparable mistake she had committed at the age of ignorance. It was out of her own will, freedom, decision and fate. Josef was always seized with the pain and guilt of his sadistic love toward his teenage girlfriend, whom he never sought over after she attempted suicide.

This book trims to the bone the inescapable issue of lost time and forgotten memories. Our protagonists were despondent at the fact that their compatriots, after some twenty years of separations, bore no interest in the exiles' lives. Why do sad memories always seem to linger around? Why do we remember this one fragment but not the other bit? Why do we often remember the faces but befuddle with names? In each of us the choice seems to occur mysteriously outside our will and our interests. Far as this book concerns, friends do not always hold the same degree of significance for each other and thus the texture, perspicuity, and depth of recollections disparate. When recollections are not evolved in a recurring manner (i.e. in conversations with friends and family), ignorance reign.

The premise of the book is tantalizing and moving though the abrupt (rather unexpected and somewhat lewd) turn of the events and the ending left me fish-mouthed (careful reader will see to the twist). I was left with the impression that the whole thing was a mere illusion. Whatever the case Kundera intended it to be, Ignorance is no less mesmerizing than his best known The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This is the kind of book that does not insatiate you with complex philospohical overtones and mind-boggling prose but at the same time challenges the simple thoughts of life. The book addresses the very simple matter of life--its memory, how we have lived life and how we go about remembering life. 4.0 stars.