Customer Reviews

Ignorance: A Novel

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I had forgotten how good Kundera is. I read his early novels years ago and loved them, but I somehow forgot what a master he is.

This book speaks to all exiles, and I mean by that all who have moved away from their roots to somewhere else for whatever reason. Those who stay behind have less and less in common with the person who returns. I can feel resonances despite living only sixty miles from where I grew up.

He is particularly good on the selectivity of memory. Did I leave because I wanted to escape or because of some other reason I now mis-remember ?

Ignorance is well crafted much like Unbearable Ligthness of Being. However I still recommend everyone to pick up The Joke, one of Kundera's earlier and controversial works.

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.

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!

One of my personal favorite authors does it again with Ignorance, a powerful, resonating book about leaving home, coming back again, relationships, eroticism, family and history. This sunk in on several levels, and I would highly recommend it to friends and writers.

The way Kundera crafts his characters in his recent novellas (Ignorance, Identity, and Slowness) reminds me of John Berger's critique of the contemporary painter Francis Bacon. According to Berger, paintings of Bacon are based on his initial brush strokes. The form, texture, and color of the initial strokes form a motif, and from this motif Bacon constructs an entire painting. Likewise for Kundera with his characters. Initially I suspect there are Kundera's observations on human psychology, on how human beings react to various situations and ideas. Kundera builds on these observations ("brush strokes"). A few observations makes up a character. Draw analogies from the classics with few of such characters, and a novel is born.

The situation and idea Kundera explores in this novel are that of an emigre, and of nostalgia, memory. The classical analogy is drawn from the relationship between Odysseus and Penelope in Homer's Odyssey.

It is amazing how much we think we know of people by knowing no more than how they react to certain events, and this is precisely where Kundera's genius lies. In Ignorance, we are given almost no factual information -- for e.g. occupation, age, physical traits such as height, hair color, eye color, etc -- regarding the two main characters Josef and Irena, yet we get to think that we know them very well by listening to how they feel about being an emigre (from Czech to France), and how they felt about their respective deceased spouses. The keen, humorous, and at times ironic, observations Kundera makes of Josef's and Irena's psychology are, as was the case in his previous novels, no less than captivating.

My complaint of the book lies in its indistinguishablity from Kundera's previous work. There is nothing new in structure nor in content that would make you excited about this book should you be a Kundera follower. On the other hand, if this is your first Kundera, I think it worthwhile reading. Ignorance is as good as any of Kundera's recent novellas.

What do we really recall after reading a terrific book? A few great scenes, the names of the main characters, a theme or two? And so with Ignorance. What do we remember of the place where we grew up, but left later to pursue an adult life? What about that first or second romance - what was her name anyway?

Kundera's story answers these questions honestly and vividly. The places we remember and that romance - they were more fantasy then reality. And so we return to home to revisit the fantasy and if we are lucky, rekindle the romance.

Reading this book is like taking a trip back home.

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.

a good book compared to what else is out there, but nothing as amazing or unique as some of his other novels. If you like Kundera, then read this book, if you haven't read any of his other books, avoid this one and read Unbearable Lightness of Being first. He touches on some of the themes that run throughtout all of his books in this book, but the focus of this book is on returning to one's homeland, one's past, and leaving it behind. As somebody who has experienced this, I can see first hand much of what he is talking about in this book, but then again, Kundera also has experienced this, and it seems as if he is talking about issues straight out of his own experiences. I gave it 4 stars because, even though I was expecting a bit more, Kundera is the sort of writer that is above most others who are publishing today.

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.