How people are not interested in other people
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Another masterpiece from Kundera about national identity and how people are not interested in other people. Irena who has spent 20 years in France returns to the Check republic at the same time as Josef, who has spent 20 years in Denmark. Their friends and family left in the home country are not very interested in what Irena and Josef have been up to abroad. They expect them to start up where they left. However the same things happen in France and Denmark; there's little interest in their past. Irena's life only has value for her French friends if they see her as a refugee and are surprised that she doesn't want to return when she's got the chance.
Irena remembers Josef, but Josef doesn't remember Irena. They just end up having lunch together and because they are both emigrants they can understand each other. Both of them fled their country for other reasons than the communism. They wanted a new start, a place where they could be independent.
Kundera's style is very sparse and he uses the characters to describe the certain emotional trauma that occurs when you return to a place in the past. As in many of other Kundera's books the characters are not meant to be real people, they are mere tools to a deeper understanding of a concept.
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English Translation - Czech Phrases
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After reading the first five pages of the book, I felt an urge to send a review or perhaps my own personal `note' to the Translator of the book, Ms Linda Asher. My question is - why did the Translator pay no attention to the diacritic of the Czech phrases (particularly when translating a work of a Czech national (although living in Paris and writing in French)? For, clearly, the `romantic' phrase "I am longing for you" in correct Czech should be: "Stýská se mi po Tobì.", not to mention that Jan Skácel has an accent above the `a' - similarly as the term émigré has its accents above the letters `e'. I would be rather interested to know whether Mr Kundera saw this very translation and if so, why did he not feel those phrases should be corrected. Has he really lost any sort of passion for his own mother-tongue - or perhaps mother-land? What is then the point in writing a book about `nostalgic' feelings for someone's land?
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Thought provoking
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I love the way Kundera makes me see my life from another perspective. In fact, I could readily identify with his themes in this novel of memory, nostalgia and emigration. Why do we leave our homeland, and why do we return? How do the people we leave behind see us? Enjoyable narrative and the usual interlinked characters. I can't speak for the translation since I read this in French.
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Thought-provoking
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Reading a novel by Kundera is like having a long meaningful conversation which lingers in your memory for weeks.
Kundera seems to be particularly fascinated with memory and in this novel he expands on the subject, putting into words things you might have thought impossible. He integrates themes of memory, absence and forgetting into a novel perfectly. In this book he speaks of a man and a woman who meet again by chance after many years. Their meeting has a different meaning to each one, mainly because their memories mismatch and with each one holding on to his/her 'memories' the relationship that forms is a strange one. When she returns to her homeland she realises how many things have changed, or perhaps she is seeing them in a different way. Although these people knew her before her exile, a lot of time has passed, and people change over the years especially if they are living apart.
An excellent and thought-provoking read!
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I love 2004
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Fairly new in paperback, Ignorance is the story of Irena and Josef; two Czech exiles who undertake a return to their homeland after the fall of Communism. Perhaps inevitably, I think anyone who has read The Unbearable Lightness of Being will to some degree be disappointed with this novel. But it is important in its own right for being, amongst other things, a proper thesis on nostalgia. The new television genre of the 'nostalgia documentary', from "I love 1960" pretty much through to "I love last week", has seemingly packaged an emotion that sells. Sated by this chocolate-box treatment of the word, we have generally lost sight of its true epic character. By unravelling etymological fabric and writing what is essentially a casebook on the subject, Kundera identifies nostalgia as a core complex of the mind and arguably as a fundamental part of what makes us human. This is particularly thought-provoking because Prague is a city in danger of losing its soul. The Czechs are rarely subject to much human attention from tourists and vice versa. Let's not bother debating cause and effect. Many visitors could do worse than to take Milan Kundera's Ignorance with them, and leave their own behind.
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