Ignorance: A Novel

Kundera can elevate the littlest things—a gesture, a question unasked, a look—into fertile substrates for profound philosophical exploration. Here he can and does—the result is art with a capital A. As with his other late-period works, the book’s brevity is one of its strengths. This is potent, sexy stuff.

This was an account of the move from one world to another and how if affected both the person who left for a better life and those who were left behind. It is a good way to see the world through the eyes of an emigre and the deep changes such a move creates in relationships among friends and family.

This is my second Milan Kundera book and I have noticed that he has a distinct way of telling stories. I picture his narrative as cinematic, as it takes you back and forth between characters and time. This book is beautiful and it explores nostalgia, home and displacement. His origins are definitely prominent in the story and the characters are so great to connect to. This book is both philosophical and alluring, definitely recommend to read it!

Kundera weaves a few characters and the barest of plots around his extended musing on the emigrant experience of returning ‘home’. Storyline is largely incidental to Kundera’s reflections, which I think are in pretty much equal parts perceptive and projection.At some points his characters seem childishly egocentric, unaware of the irony of their constant lament, “No-one will listen to me. No one is really interested in what I have to say,” as they, themselves, show not a shred of interest in anyone else. This is particularly applied to the returning Czech émigrés:The worst thing is, [the locals who had not emigrated] kept talking to me about things and people I knew nothing about. They refused to see that after all this time, their world has evaporated from my head. They thought with all my memory blanks I was trying to make myself interesting. To stand out. It was a very strange conversation: I’d forgotten who they had been; they weren’t interested in who I’d become. Can you believe that not one person here has ever asked me a single question about my life abroad? Not one single question! Never!Where Kundera goes, perhaps, beyond this is in presenting this as a human condition thing. In response Irena’s complaint about the indifference of her erstwhile compatriots, fellow émigré Josef asks of her adopted country:“And what about in France? Do your friends there ask you any questions?”She is about to say yes, but then she thinks again; she wants to be precise, and she speaks slowly: “No, of course not! But when people spend a lot of time together, they assume they know each other. They don’t ask themselves any questions and they don’t worry about it. They’re not interested in each other, but it’s completely innocent. They don’t realise it.”OK, sure, there’s stuff to mull over here (and Kundera is a definitive writer for mulling things over). Moreover he bolsters his case with suggestions that we can’t really interact – our perceptions and, particularly, our memories - even of the same events - are so unavoidably disparate. This particular issue is recurring for him – or, at least, there are real shades of it in this line from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania, the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without.Perceptive.But, perhaps, blind projection – look at that wonderful generalisation of ‘everyone’. How far is Kundera presuming his experience – honestly and articulately expressed – is uniform? Take just the example from this extract: when people return or arrive from other countries, even other cities, in my experience it’s enormously common to hear them plastered (or, if it’s you, to be plastered) with questions about the experience, even to the point of the visitor getting tired of responding to similar questions. Sure some are just enquiring at a shallow, etiquette level, but many are genuinely interested in detail. I could be completely wrong – Kundera’s friends would know – but from this book I wouldn’t be surprised if much of these thoughts come from his own experience as an émigré, and that he wasn’t that interested in the experience of those who stayed, and was surprised at how little interest was shown in him. Many readers would be able to relate to this, but I don’t know how much of this is more about personality than humanity.Other elements that make this sound more profound than whiny are: his assured prose style; educated description of subtleties of how different languages deal with the term ‘nostalgia’; and the classical motif of Odysseus. But I think this sort of thing is intellectually neutral, and, in itself, shows more about class than insight (cf. Fry’s The Liar). And even though he must have been in his seventies, he still had his trademark adultery (cf. Lodge) – also seen as European sophistication in an SBS sort of way. It doesn’t rule the whole book – it’s more of a coda – but I just don’t get how casually it’s viewed – like someone deciding to try out a new hairstyle or something. I did, however, relate to Joseph’s cringing at reading his old diaries, and Kundera is highly adept at evoking specific resonances like this. If you read him it might be something else, but it will probably leap off the page at you. That being said, overall this was a pretty meandering book – probably just as well it was more of a novella than a novel.

If you don't like Kundera then this is not the book for you. Go away we can't be friends.

In this "Homeric tale of exile, memory, and homecoming," as described in The Guardian, Kundera manages to explore the nostalgia, I repeat, the nostalgia of the homeland. Alongside also exploring the concepts of memory and forgetting. Kundera describes nostalgia as "the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return." Now if we look further back and ask what causes this yearning for return, there is the spirit and the roots of the individual to the place which gave him/her existence. "What happens to people when they have to emigrate their native country? Is it true that emigration causes artists to lose their creativity?" Perhaps the yearning to return stems from "no longer having the roots of their native land to nourish" their inspiration for living. Recollections, in turn, allow the emigres to hold in memory those specificities that still link them to their homeland in that fashion of life, and possibly forget all others.Nostalgia and memory do not have a one-to-one relationship, so says Kundera. "Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing." "For nostalgia does not heighten memory's activity, it does not awaken recollection; it suffices unto itself, until its own feeling, so fully absorbed is it by its suffering and nothing else." Irena is consumed by memories but feels very little nostalgia to return. In fact, it is only by her friend's persuasion that she decides to visit the homeland. She feels as though her 20 years in France, having raised her own family and made her own life, is her actual homeland. She feels she has no more ties to her homeland, no more ties even to the mother she left behind. But her memories randomly and by surprise haunt her every day life, and it is through these memories that she is pushed to return, ultimately. Josef, on the other hand, "had neither reason nor occasion to concern himself with recollections bound to the country he no longer lived in," yet yearns to return and in fact does. What a complex dynamic between memory and nostalgia.Sometimes while reading this book it feels like rugged terrain, struggling to keep pace or a grasp on ideas. It seems too much in a much too convoluted sense. It feels like there are two dichotomous personalities to the book (much like memory and nostalgia come to think of it). This is especially the case when Kundera shifts from social relationships to the inner relationship within the main character with their own selves. And then much like nostalgia and memory, the novel is very interconnected, weaving a root system through the book to link the components of what makes us human as a whole. Ultimately, formulating a vision of the complexity of the human spirit.There is a special part in the novel that needs recording. It goes above and beyond the premise of nostalgia and memory. It will make you think about what truly makes us human, and why nostalgia most likely exists in the first place. This part of the book is also the link between our relationships to people and to ourselves. It also shows how very little we know, or even begin to understand, of our own makeup as human beings. The Excerpt can be found at "Book Reviews, Fiction Reflections, N' More"

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