The Barnes & Noble Review
Milan Kundera's novel Ignorance explores a scenario close to his heart -- lovers who are swept away (and apart) by fate. It also shows why Kundera is one of the most distinctive talents working today. Like his earlier work, this novel is a delicious combination of eroticism and ephemeral themes, which meld into a powerful, moving tale.
Not surprisingly, fate's agent here is the 1968 Soviet invasion of Kundera's native Czechoslovakia. The book's protagonists, Josef and Irena, both fled after the crushing of the Prague Spring, only to return in the 1990s -- with much trepidation -- after the end of communist rule. What they find is a no-longer-familiar landscape, distant friends, and, briefly, solace in each other's arms. All of these notions will be familiar to fans of Kundera, whose previous works include The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Life Is Elsewhere, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The author, who was himself forced into exile in 1968, has spent the better part of his writing career retracing his footsteps -- a forgivable compulsion, since it has produced some fascinating work. Granted, in Ignorance this theme appears a bit shopworn, given the passage of a decade since the demise of communism in eastern Europe. And linguistically, the story comes to us third-hand; Kundera originally wrote the tale in French, which was then translated into economical English by Linda Asher. But what we get is another entertaining, quick read. Sam Stall
Tom LeClair
When considering Ignorance, some knowledge is useful. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1929, Milan Kundera was fired from his university teaching position at the Prague Film Academy—and his writings were proscribed—soon after the Soviet invasion of 1968. In 1975 he emigrated to France, where he wrote The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being and other novels in Czech. His three most recent novels—Immortality, Slowness and Identity—were primarily about French characters, and the last two were written in French. Ignorance was also composed in French, but returns to Czech characters as they return to their homeland after the fall of communism.
In Ignorance, Kundera asks a question he has probably often heard during his years in France: "Is it true that emigration causes artists to lose their creativity?" Although none of his four major characters are artists whose experiences might engage that question, the novel in which they exist answers in Kundera's usual indirect and qualified way: "not necessarily." Kundera's French novels have been less highly regarded than his Czech novels. Ignorance recaptures the larger-than-personal relevance of those earlier works. By reversing the émigré experience, the author creatively mines the rich material of changed people returning to a changed country and writes his best novel in more than a decade. "[T]he very notion of homeland," Kundera writes, "with all its emotional power, is bound up with the relative brevity of our life, which allows us too little time to become attached to some other country, to other countries, to other languages."
Irena, now "forty-something," moved toFrance because her husband was harassed in 1969. After he died, she began living in Paris with a Swedish émigré named Gustaf who loves Prague, opens an office there and tries to persuade Irena to move home. On one of her trips back, Irena runs into Josef, who emigrated to Denmark and is returning to the Czech Republic for the first time in decades. She recognizes him as a man who made a pass at her when she was young, but he doesn't recognize her. Irena conceals from Josef what she remembers; he conceals from her what he has forgotten. Ignorance begins.
Josef is returning to the Czech Republic to satisfy the wish of his dead Danish wife but finds himself excited by the prospect of sex with a woman whose name he doesn't know. Irena returns to please her lover but sees in Josef a way to recapture her Czech youth, get free of Gustaf and perhaps escape her stifling family. Irena and Josef arrange to meet just before he goes back to Denmark.
While waiting for their liaison, the protagonists visit family and friends, Czechs who have managed to survive or manipulate the political system. But Irena and Josef ignore what they might learn from these people, and their false expectations of each other lead to betrayals of themselves, others and their histories. Complementing these two ambivalent and changing characters are simpler folk: Gustaf, who enjoys the novelty of Prague, and Milada, one of Josef's old girlfriends, who suffers because she never left the city. Taken together, the characters' responses to emigration represent the divided or quartered mind of their creator.
As in the past, Kundera shows little interest in soliciting readers of conventional novels. The title is off-putting. The characters and events seem like anecdotes assembled to illustrate a rambling lecture, perhaps by an amateur psychiatrist. We know little about the characters, what they look like, what they do. When emotional momentum builds between characters, Kundera shifts to other characters or to a philosophical reflection. He interrupts the novel's climactic sex scene several times. Detached telling dominates intimate showing. Abstractions take the place of the occasional concrete description.
These methods are Kundera's way of imposing ignorance on readers, giving us less than we expect or want—and forcing us to concentrate intensely on the puzzle pieces he leaves on the table. How is piece J like piece G, unlike piece I, a version of piece M? What does "home" really mean to these four characters? How are the returnees like Homer's Odysseus, to whom Kundera continually refers throughout the text? In the realm of motives, can family dynamics be separated from political oppression? What difference would knowledge of the past make when personal and social circumstances are so changed? Why is Ignorance from its first page onward saturated with a series of literal questions similar to these?
I think I know the answer to that last one. Many readers want to feel at home in a novel, secure as a native, unquestioned. But émigrés rarely feel completely at home—in their new country, back in their old country. Memory haunts them or leaves them with lacunae. They are continually forced to question the extent of their ignorance. Kundera's wayward narration and unanswerable speculations match perfectly with this ignorance, as similar methods did in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Like Kundera's characters, readers experience émigré uncertainty by moving around in this interrogative Book of Sadness and Remembering.
Sadness, remembering and some comedy: an absurd chat full of non sequiturs between Josef and a former communist; a devastating mockery of a teenage girl's desire to emigrate to a better place through suicide; Gustaf's grotesque seduction by his mother-in-law, the motherland he never had; a possibly parodic, possibly profound "mathematical" analysis of memory. Kundera's novel is a timely meditation on a Europe with more émigrés, exiles, refugees and displaced people than at any time since World War II. Ignorance is not bliss, but it troubles in canny and witty ways.
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. (Oct. 4) Forecast: Kundera's succession of novels with one-word titles (Identity; Slowness; Immortality), all originally written in French, have drawn a more mixed reception from critics than his earlier novels written in Czech. This novel will probably be no exception-and will likely match the previous three in sales-but the consistency and quality of Kundera's output is matched by few contemporary writers. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
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 migr s 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. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/02.]-Christopher Tinney, Brooklyn Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Czech émigré Kundera (Identity, 1998, etc.) returns to Prague for this hodgepodge of romance, history, and philosophy. Kundera has long since morphed into a kind of Czech Woody Allen, writing novels about neurotic characters falling into impossible love affairs while the narrator diverts himself with highbrow musings on fate and history. The odd couple this time are Josef and Irena, each returned to Prague after more than 20 years' exile to see what it has made of life after Communism. Irena has lived in Paris since 1969, and wasn't especially eager to go back-her French friends had to persuade her to return, partly because her Swedish lover Gustaf recently set up a business in Prague. Josef is returning from Denmark, where he's lived also since the 1960s. The two were young and inexperienced lovers then, in the Prague Spring that nearly toppled the Party-and led eventually to their emigration. Both married abroad, but both spouses have now died. Back again, Irena finds little that's appealing: The city is gray, her old friends foreign and distant. Josef finds that his older brother, once a Party stalwart, has adjusted to the new order and become an entrepreneur. Together, Josef and Irena try to discover what they lost when the Soviet invasion forced them apart in 1968, but their old love seems to have become as distant and alien as the city has. As usual, the author fills out the story with reflections on Schönberg, the Odyssey, and philosophy ("Memory cannot be understood, either, without a mathematical approach. The fundamental given is the ratio between the amount of time in the lived life and the amount of time from that life that is stored in memory"), which arediverting in their way but also distracting. An honorable failure: Kundera's taking himself too seriously is offset by his ability to change the subject again and again-though, at end, nothing adds up to much.
From the Publisher
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
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A tour de force.
Rocky Mountain News
Kundera is and elegant writer … He does a masterful job of reminding that the political is the personal.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
An entertaining and thought-provoking work
Montreal Gazette
Precise and spare …page by page this novel is dazzling.
Time Out New York
Elegant … the emotional and intellectual payoff is extraordinary.
Newark Star Ledger
[A] beautifully written tale of desire and loss.
Newsweek
Nothing short of masterful.
Washington Post Book World
Kundera once more delivers a seductive, intelligent entertainment … [with] elegance and grace.
Los Angeles Times Book Review
By far his most successful [novel] since THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING.
Boston Globe
Moving … There is a painful injustice and inequality to memory, which these encounters beautifully illustrate.
Michiko Kakutani
Milan’s Kundera’s resonant new novel IGNORANCE ….[is] wonderfully nuanced …. affecting.
Maureen Howard
Erudite and playful...An impassioned account of the émigré as a character on the stage of European history.
