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Ignorance
 
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Ignorance (Hardcover)

by Milan Kundera (Author), Linda Asher (Translator)
4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
RRP: £16.99
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 154 pages
  • Publisher: Faber and Faber (4 Nov 2002)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0571215505
  • ISBN-13: 978-0571215508
  • Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 14.4 x 2.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 799,450 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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    #42 in  Books > Fiction > Authors, A-Z > K > Kundera, Milan

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Product Description

Product Description

A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier when they chose to become exiles. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence 'their memories no longer match'. We always believe that our memories coincide with those of the person we loved, that we experienced the same thing. But this is just an illusion as the memory records only 'an insignificant, minuscule particle' of the past, 'and no one knows why it's this bit and not any other bit'. We live our lives sunk in a vast forgetting, and we refuse to see it. Only those who return after twenty years, like Ulysses returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance first-hand. Milan Kundera has taken these dizzying concepts of absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transformed them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work.


About the Author

Milan Kundera was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1929. After the Russian invasion in August 1968 his books were proscribed. In 1975 he and his wife settled in France and in 1981 he became a French citizen. He has written many critically acclaimed novels, of which The Unbearable Lightness of Being is hailed as a contemporary classic.

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Customer Reviews

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Average Customer Review
4.1 out of 5 stars (10 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Return of the exile, 3 Nov 2003
This review is from: Ignorance (Paperback)
I had forgotten how good Kundera is. I read his early novels years ago and loved them, but I somehow forgot what a master he is.

This book speaks to all exiles, and I mean by that all who have moved away from their roots to somewhere else for whatever reason. Those who stay behind have less and less in common with the person who returns. I can feel resonances despite living only sixty miles from where I grew up.

He is particularly good on the selectivity of memory. Did I leave because I wanted to escape or because of some other reason I now mis-remember ?

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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars I love 2004, 13 Feb 2004
This review is from: Ignorance (Paperback)
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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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A Rich Tapestry, 2 Sep 2003
This review is from: Ignorance (Paperback)
Milan Kundera's latest work adds to his reputation as a haunting philosophical writer with a unique and compelling mastery of language.

Taking the themes of ignorance, identity, nostalgia, memory and love, and adding a fresh examination of 'The Odyssey', he weaves a powerful tale of homecoming around three main characters: Irena, who undertakes a 'Great Return' to the Czech Republic; Josef, who, embarking on the same journey, finds himself adrift in his 'homeland' - 'listening to an unknown language whose every word he understood'; and Milada, a lonely woman scarred for life by a traumatic episode in her teens. All three are connected by their memories of who they were and, in the cases of Irena and Josef, by their confusion as to who they have become during the long years of exile. But memories, Kundera stresses, are weak, unreliable and inconsistent with the recollections of others. Yet, as demonstrated by Irena, Josef and Milada, they form a disproportionately large part of our identities. What happens then, when they are revealed as false or misleading? What happens when we are then left effectively ignorant of ourselves?

Read it and think.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Exile equals death
This book is Milan Kundera's variation on the Odyssey theme, exemplified in the fate of his home country the Czech Republic and its inhabitants. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Luc REYNAERT

4.0 out of 5 stars How people are not interested in other people
Another masterpiece from Kundera about national identity and how people are not interested in other people. Read more
Published on 16 Oct 2007 by Lou Ice

1.0 out of 5 stars English Translation - Czech Phrases
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. Read more
Published on 1 Aug 2006 by Reader

5.0 out of 5 stars Thought provoking
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. Read more
Published on 3 April 2006 by Zoe

4.0 out of 5 stars Thought-provoking
Reading a novel by Kundera is like having a long meaningful conversation which lingers in your memory for weeks. Read more
Published on 7 Nov 2004 by miriamcalleja

4.0 out of 5 stars Rich in ideas on human sensitivity and psychology
Ignorance" is a very dense work in terms of all the ideas it raises, despite it being short. It is primarily a tale of homecoming after the many years of silent absence of those... Read more
Published on 24 Feb 2003 by A. Peel

4.0 out of 5 stars Kundera falters in his own, beautiful, dreamlike way
I have loved Kundera’s books since reading The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. That, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Read more
Published on 6 Feb 2003 by ghandibob

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