Ignorance: A Novel [Paperback]

Milan Kundera (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 2003

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."

Editorial Reviews

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial (September 30, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060002107
• ISBN-13: 978-0060002107
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #72,580 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Milan Kundera, born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, was a student when the Czech Communist regime was established in 1948, and later worked as a labourer, jazz musician and professor at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Prague. After the Russian invasion in August 1968, his books were proscribed. In 1975, he and his wife settled in France, and in 1981, he became a French citizen. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and of the short-story collection Laughable Loves - all originally in Czech. His most recent novels, Slowness, Identity and Ignorance, as well as his non-fiction works The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intelligent and unique but probably not for a wide audience, November 10, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Ignorance: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ignorance--the revival of Kundera's great romancing, October 6, 2002

By 

"kachooney" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ignorance: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An impressive return to form, October 26, 2002

By 

greg (Geneva, Switzerland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ignorance: A Novel (Hardcover)

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.