Review of

Ignorance by Milan Kundera

(translated by Linda Asher), Faber & Faber, Nov 4 2002, £16.99

kundera

Kundera's latest novel offers the reader the usual panoply of floating questions and characters that identify the Czech writer as a master disseminator. Into this particular pot he throws slabs of Czech history, the history and sense of place and self, the experience of the émigre and interludes on Odysseus’s voyage back to Ithaca all awash in the juices of memory and nostalgia which, rather inevitably, leave a bitter-sweet aftertaste. Josef and Irena are both self-exiled Czechs, returning to their homeland for the first time in twenty years. A chance encounter at a Paris airport and a long lost love affair that only Irena recalls, begin the series of connections and separations that Kundera puts in place to explore. On his return to Czechoslovakia, Josef is suddenly haunted by the forgotten memory of another love affair, while Irena visits only to find the “decades hovering above the dishes" when she is reunited with family and friends. Both characters are driven by a desire to capture and tame the nostalgia which has brought them back to Prague but instead find themselves caught up in reinterpretations and reappraisals of memories which are as illusory and uncertain as the nostalgia they pursue. Such remembrances, Kundera seems to suggest, are ultimately skewed by the effortlessness of time and the effort of its recollection, while our definitions of ourselves and others are continually distorted by the fragility of our own minds. Constantly questing for inquiry, Milan Kundera is adept at channelling the most disparate and indefinable of ideas into a swell of narrative finesse. Irena and Josef's looming affair drives this slim novel, but Kundera's expert hand weaves a fine web of silky digressions which draw the reader into his exiled and exhilarating world. "But that's enough of questions that have no answers!" enunciates one of the characters in Ignorance. With Kundera, you get the feeling that it’ll never be the case.

Originally published in the EDP newspaper (Norwich, 2002)