Milan Kundera is perhaps best known in the West for his popular book The Unbearable Lightness of Being. However, his other works are just as beautifully written and well worth reading. Ignorance, first published in 2000 in French, was translated into English in 2002. At 195 pages it is a short read that manages to take on large themes such as emigration, exile, and the nature of memory.
A Synopsis of Kundera’s Ignorance
Kundera’s Ignorance is set in 1989 after the Communists have fallen in Prague. The main protagonists are Irena and Josef, both emigrants, returning to Czechoslovakia for the first time in decades. Irena has been living in France for the past twenty years and is pressured into returning to Prague by her boyfriend Gustaf. The two characters meet and while Irena distinctly remembers Josef from her past, he neglects to tell her he does not remember her at all.
Feelings About Returning Home
Irena is adamant that France is her home now and is mystified that none of her old Czech friends are interested in her French experiences. At a party with her old friends “she soon sees that their questions are of a particular kind: questions to check whether she knows what they know, whether she remembers what they remember…. Earlier, by their total uninterest in her experience abroad, they amputated twenty years from her life.” (p. 43) Meanwhile, Josef returns from Denmark to fulfill a request made by his now deceased wife. He too finds it hard to fit into his old country. In reading his old diary, he’s struck by the difference between what his mind remembers and what he finds written.
Kundera’s Ignorance and Odysseus’s Great Return
In Kundera's Ignorance there is a continuous reference to the Odyssey and Odysseus’s Great Return; comparing this return to that of Irena and Josef. He further uses the Odyssey as a springboard to philosophize about the nature of nostalgia. Many émigrés long to return to their homeland, yet find their memories wither or their home is not as they remembered. Odysseus comes to learn that “his life, the very essence of his life, its center, its treasure, lay outside Ithaca, in the twenty years of his wanderings”. (p. 34) Just as Irena, twenty years gone, finds that her life in France is unaccepted by the Czechs, so Odysseus finds no one in Ithaca is interested in his travels.
Milan Kundera’s Exile
Milan Kundera was born in Czechoslovakia and moved to France in 1975. He was expelled out of the Communist Party twice and his books were banned from his native country for their satirical take on Communism. Since he was pushed out of his country it is likely that emigration and exile are topics of particular importance to him. They are certainly important in Kundera's Ignorance. This book is not just a good read; it offers a philosophical discourse on the nature of emigration and the feelings a Great Return can provoke.
Kundera, Milan. Ignorance.Trans. Linda Asher. New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2002.
