[Karlmarks]

I just realised I haven't posted this review. It was written back in 2005, so I'm hazy on the book now. But I'm posting it anyway. Maybe others have read it.
Ignorance, by Milan Kundera, is a small novel but big on ideas. Playing like a watered down Odyssey, two Czech ?migr?s return to post-communist Prague after twenty years. A chance meeting in the airport stirs memories of long ago that leads to an interesting study of our memory, its limits and unreliability, and how, in our ignorance, we can take it for granted and trust it too much.

Irena fled to France during the Russian invasion; Josef to Denmark. Both have built new lives, made new friends, and forgotten who they were. After the fall of European communism in 1989, they return to their city only to find that it’s no longer theirs; it’s full of tourists, whores, and restaurants the Czechs can’t afford. A chance sighting in the airport causes Irena to engage Josef in conversation; she remembers him from a conversation twenty years ago. They agree to meet, and, as the novel builds up to their rendezvous, they go about their homecomings - meeting parents, friends, and, ultimately, themselves - to discover that Prague is no longer home.

Stylistically, the book is a dream. Although little happens in the novel - a conversation here, a wander there – it is the narrator’s asides that gels the experience, wandering off into philosophical mode, or giving atypical history lessons - all the time, maintaining a poetic tone. The prose is terse, but just right to create the surreal atmosphere it needs to succeed. It wanders effortlessly between the different characters and the lessons learned from their actions.

The characters are well drawn, although their focus is completely on their homecoming, their memory, and doubts about their patriotism. Their actions are believable; their conversations intelligent. Prague, as a character, is underdone – little of the city is given, and, after twenty years, it would have been nice to know the visible changes that time has wrought.

Overall, Kundera has provided an appealing novel, doubtless inspired by his own circumstances as a Czech ?migr?. While it may not be to the tastes of all (i.e. those seeking action) it does endow us with food for thought, something to consider about our memories. And, at least for me, the true thrill was watching how the philosophical and historical asides came together to complete the novel, and reinforce the characters’ feelings.

[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.

[Unhappu]

It's very interesting to find review of a book you just finished because it help(specialy in this case) to isolate your own feeling on the book.
Mine where a mixt of good ,the style and the characteres,and bad for what i felt a bit artificial in the construction.
My gowing impression was of a lecture (hy Eric) on Nostalgia from kundera ,who draw in some characteres to make an aplication of his demonstrations.He describe a feeling,an idea,them apply it on Irena and joseph.The very systeme of it is what kept me from enjoying th novel the fully.
Appart from that,the book is gorge with lucide bit,pardoxe(nostalgia is stronger in the young)and ironie that make it a joy at time.And I should like to read another more "natural" of his book, but maybe natural would not be his style,and it in this achitectural construction that Kundera is the best.
A last thing,at the very start,speaking about the difference in language of the nostaligia(yearning to return),he metion that French as an unsatifiing expression for missing someone or someplace."Je m'ennuie de toi" for i miss you,the right expression would be "tu me manque"which is approriate and stronger.Kundera writing in French and i certain a connoisseur of the tongue would have pick his word to fit his needs?
That put me of the deffensive as for what was to come.

[Rqqneujr]

My gowing impression was of a lecture on Nostalgia from kundera ,who draw in some characteres to make an aplication of his demonstrations.

Absolutely. Kundera does the same on The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. His prose is a mix of essay and meta-narrative. In this specific novel I enjoyed his lecturing more than what his characters were going through. His insights into politics, philosophy, literature, when unburdened by fiction, are fascinating.

[Sillaycheg]

I am going to seek this book out (hi,saliotomas), because of the content. I hope that those who say that it is too static are wrong, because obviously a happy blend of form and content means that the reader enjoys the movement of the book, but the author still gets various salient points across.

What is important about the theme of the book as described by Stewart, at the beginning here, is that it is the reality of tens of thousands of of intelligent, middle-class people who objected to the idiotic Soviet system of semi-poverty and fear that was being imposed on them, got out or were thrown out, only to experience utter dissillusionment when they return to their liberated countries. The world had moved on.

Whether you come from Prague, Tallinn, Krak?w, Vilnius, Budapest, Bucharest, Belgrade, Sofia, Berlin, or wherever else in the former Soviet bloc, it must be painful to realise that all the things that the self-sacrificial idealists of the 1960-1980s were striving for, i.e. a normal life as we know it in Western Europe, are now so normal there too that the populace takes them for granted. Also that spivs and the mafia have moved in where the (spivs and the mafia of the) Communist Party operated from 1945-1991.

These basic truths should be understood by anyone dealing with Eastern & Central Europe and reading novels alluding to the zone. So I can forgive Kundera if he becomes preachy or essa?stic. It's worth it to get the mentality across to readers in Western Euope, who lived in a different world for half a century.