[Rqqneujr]

Placing it between Identity and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting in terms of personal pleasure, this short novel contains many of Kundera?s most interesting stylistic marks: authorial digressions, linguistic anecdotes, literary criticism (this is a must for The Odyssey fans), Czech culture, politics, sex. In Ignorance the author tackles forced emigration, namely by the Czechs who fled their country after the 1969 Soviet clampdown. It?s also about returning home after the Soviets left in 1989. But for some people it?s not easy coming back. And some, like Irena and Josef in the novel, don?t even want to come back, not after spending decades building a new life in a foreign country.

Two strangers meet in Prague one day on the day of their return. They?re there to see if it?s ever possible to start life again in their country of origin. And as these two meet we also get to know them. Kundera, who never returned to the Czech Republic after the fall of communism, makes it clear he thinks going back is pointless: after decades abroad, no one remembers you, no one cares about you; everyone judges you for being a coward, a traitor; those who stayed and endured misery stoically, they think, those are the heroes.

Kundera doesn?t spare his country: Prague is indistinguishable from any other modern metropolis, with the same neon lights, the same ads, the same music, the same slogans, the same food, the same t-shirts, the same tourist postcards. Everything is the same everywhere under Globalization, so why choose Prague? Why not stay in France?

This novel contains a lot of big ideas in just over 150 pages, but it?s lucid without ever being dense, and it?s remarkably funny at times. Kundera is really beginning to grow on me.