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 migrs 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.
*Starred Review* Can we ever really go home? As in his previous work, particularly The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1981) and Laughable Loves (1974), Franco-Czech author Kundera uses the most basic human encounters to ask the largest questions about what is really shared between people, what links our former and present selves, how languages change who we are, and the meaning of nostalgia and homeland. After nearly 20 years in Paris and after the fall of Czech communism, Irena considers moving back to her native country and returns for a visit. In the airport, she meets Josef, also an immigrant, with whom she shared a single evening years ago in Prague. Irena remembers their initial meeting with detailed intensity and has always regretted its abrupt, chaste conclusion. Josef doesn't even recognize Irena, but he lies and a passionate climax follows. Using the brilliant framework of this and other confused affairs, Kundera explores the contorted nature of memory and an emigre's "great return," weaving in examples of Odysseus and the yearning of Holocaust survivors. Part intellectual postulating, part exquisite storytelling, Kundera's profound, unsettling, and expertly crafted novel examines the ultimate immigration--leaving behind what's inherited--and marvels at the power and impossibility of it. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Erudite and playful...An impassioned account of the émigré as a character on the stage of European history.” — Maureen Howard, New York Times Book Review
“Milan’s Kundera’s resonant new novel IGNORANCE ….[is] wonderfully nuanced …. affecting.” — Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“Moving … There is a painful injustice and inequality to memory, which these encounters beautifully illustrate.” — Boston Globe
“Literary excellence … [Kundera’s] irony and wit are …on target, his characters vivid and convincing.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review
“By far his most successful [novel] since THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Kundera once more delivers a seductive, intelligent entertainment … [with] elegance and grace.” — Washington Post Book World
“Nothing short of masterful.” — Newsweek
“[A] beautifully written tale of desire and loss.” — Newark Star Ledger
“Elegant … the emotional and intellectual payoff is extraordinary.” — Time Out New York
“Precise and spare …page by page this novel is dazzling.” — Montreal Gazette
“Rendered with compassion and humor.” — Library Journal
“An entertaining and thought-provoking work” — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Kundera is and elegant writer … He does a masterful job of reminding that the political is the personal.” — Rocky Mountain News
“A tour de force.” — Atlanta Journal-Constitution
From the Back Cover
A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier when they chose to become exiles. 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." We always believe that our memories coincide with those of the person we loved, that we experienced the same thing. But this is just an illusion. Then again, what can we expect of our weak memory? It records only "an insignificant, minuscule particle" of the past, "and no one knows why it's this bit and not any other bit." We live our lives sunk in a vast forgetting, a fact we refuse to recognize. Only those who return after twenty years, like Odysseus returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance firsthand.
Milan Kundera is the only author today who can take such dizzying concepts as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transform them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work.
About the Author
The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929 - 2023) was born in Brno and lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. 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 the short story collection Laughable Loves—all originally in Czech. His later novels, Slowness, Identity, Ignorance, and The Festival of Insignificance, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.
