Rating: 
Summary: Kundera's Best Work in Several Years
Review: I was skimming the Internet and came across a site that gave a perfect description of Kundera's latest novel: the book of "leaving" and forgetting. I thought this play on Kundera's previous masterpiece was appropriate. His latest novel deals with the many forms of forgetting that occur when people emigrate. I suspect this is a topic that Kundera knows well. The primary characters are Irena and Josef. Both left Czechoslovakia after the communists took over and found new homes in Europe. Irena went to Paris while Josef selected Denmark. The characters meet in an airport lounge as they return to their homeland, and the ignorance begins. Kundera presents ignorance, a term he loosely connects with nostalgia in the early chapters, in its many forms. As the story unfolds, we see how the main characters have forgotten much of their old life, and have forgotten that life will also go on. Respectively, details from personal diaries cannot be recalled, and the desire to question old friends about old ideas are key points of ignorance. Their friends and family suffer from much of the same (except N, who seems to be the most wise despite how others view him). This seems especially true of those who are inspired by ill will such as Josef's sister in law. Kundera even addresses the age of ignorance when we simply do not know better. This form of ignorance is conveyed through the character Milada. Along the way, we see many of the same techniques that Kundera has become famous for. In Ignorance, we find many comparisons to Odysseus, his life with Calypso, and eventual return home to Penelope. Familiar names such Thomas Mann, Jan Skacel, and Schoenberg make appearances. And as we would expect, Kundera weaves a tale of commentary, quotes, history, and the main narrative to make his point. He moves and quotes much like a jazz musician. At first I wondered if I would be disappointed by the same old literary techniques Kundera has been using for years. Let me answer my own concerns with a firm "no!" This is Kundera's best work in years and I enjoyed this book far more than I enjoyed Slowness or Identity. As always, Kundera makes us think. I found the narrative much more inviting than in his last two books, and the characters were much easier to connect with. I also appreciated the fact that there were no highly unusual sexual descriptions. I must admit, I was starting to worry about my favorite author after reading Slowness. If you are a Kundera fan, then I certainly encourage you to read what I think is his best work since Immortality. If you are new to Kundera, this would certainly be an enjoyable book to read. Though not on par with Immortality, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, or Life is Elsewhere, it is an excellent work and I am very glad I took the time to read it immediately. I hope you enjoy it too.
Rating: 
Summary: Better than Slowness & Identity
Review: If you're a fan of Kundera, then this book is for you (and you've likely already purchased and consumed it) but is a poor selection if you're unaccustomed to his prose. This short work certainly has more to admire than Kundera's previous two novellas: Identity and Slowness. Still, I can't help but wish that Kundera would return to the level of greatness that he displayed in Immortality, the Joke, and the Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Rating:
Summary: Contemplation of Life
Review: Ignorance is a novel that exposes the weakness and fallibility of our memory. Milan Kundera evokes the question to what extent our poor memory renders us ignorant. Irena and Josef chanced to encounter one another at Paris airport while returning to their homeland, which they had pertinaciously abandoned twenty years ago during the Russian invasion. Both of them chose to be unlawful exiles with whom families dare not to keep in contact. Irena, then pregnant with her second child, fled with her husband Martin to Paris and soon led a poverty-stricken life as a widow until she became Gustaf's mistress. Irena instantly recognized Josef at the first sight of him: they had met at a friend's party in Prague some 20 years ago. She had regretted parting with him after the party and was stricken with a wound that never healed. Josef fled the country when he was a medical student in veterinary medicine. Unlike his brother who succumbed to the Communist reign and denied his own convictions to demonstrate support, Josef could not bear to see his country enslaved and humiliated. He settled down in Copenhagen, got married, became a vet. Not a day passed without Josef's reminiscing his deceased wife. He loved her even more, in a melancholy and memorial way, and respected all her customs, such as taking care every chair, vase, and lamp was where she had liked it. While our protagonists sighed at the drastic changes of their once-familiar homeland and the wiping out of landmarks, a more subtle but inevitable issue emerged. Their rueful recollections and nostalgia caught up with them, in fragments, fear, and regret. However obdurately and diligently they tried to shield off past memories and put off paltry values of the past lives, the pang of regret and sense of loneliness never spared them. Irena always felt emigration was an irreparable mistake she had committed at the age of ignorance. It was out of her own will, freedom, decision and fate. Josef was always seized with the pain and guilt of his sadistic love toward his teenage girlfriend, whom he never sought over after she attempted suicide. This book trims to the bone the inescapable issue of lost time and forgotten memories. Our protagonists were despondent at the fact that their compatriots, after some twenty years of separations, bore no interest in the exiles' lives. Why do sad memories always seem to linger around? Why do we remember this one fragment but not the other bit? Why do we often remember the faces but befuddle with names? In each of us the choice seems to occur mysteriously outside our will and our interests. Far as this book concerns, friends do not always hold the same degree of significance for each other and thus the texture, perspicuity, and depth of recollections disparate. When recollections are not evolved in a recurring manner (i.e. in conversations with friends and family), ignorance reign. The premise of the book is tantalizing and moving though the abrupt (rather unexpected and somewhat lewd) turn of the events and the ending left me fish-mouthed (careful reader will see to the twist). I was left with the impression that the whole thing was a mere illusion. Whatever the case Kundera intended it to be, Ignorance is no less mesmerizing than his best known The Unbearable Lightness of Being. This is the kind of book that does not insatiate you with complex philospohical overtones and mind-boggling prose but at the same time challenges the simple thoughts of life. The book addresses the very simple matter of life--its memory, how we have lived life and how we go about remembering life. 4.0 stars.
Rating:
Summary: The Joke
Review: Ignorance is well crafted much like Unbearable Ligthness of Being. However I still recommend everyone to pick up The Joke, one of Kundera's earlier and controversial works.
Rating: 
Summary: Ignorance--the revival of Kundera's great romancing
Review: In a historical sense, it would be easy to compare Kundera's latest novel with its two immediate predecessors, Slowness and Identity. All three were penned in French, unlike his earlier, bulkier, more popular works, originally in Czech. All three are relatively short, quick reads. All three are similarly named, taking as their one-word titles general characteristics (although this was not unheard of in his Czech works: Ignorance is a direct correlative, and titles like the Unbearable Lightness of Being, while multi-worded, are in the same vein). Having just finished Ignorance, however, I think that it rises far above Slowness and Identity. Kundera, as a romancier français, has been criticized for poverty of language. His French prose, critics have argued, is not as sumptuous and free-flowing as his native Czech. Gallimard has yet to publish a version of the original French, so I haven't had a chance to examine it firsthand, but it we are to trust translator Linda Asher (who has also done translations of his last two works), it is safe to say that Kundera is mastering his French more and more with the passage of time. Ignorance's prose is perhaps not as thick as some of Kundera's best Czech work (Life is Elsewhere and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting come to mind for their superlatively natural flow from idea to idea and richness of speech), but it is certainly lucid and not perceptibly forced. Thematically as well, Kundera has tightened himself with Ignorance. In his grandes oeuvres, it was easier to explore depths of character and numerous themes in great detail. In the shorter format that Kundera has opted for in his French writing, that kind of exposition is not possible. Slowness and Identity (to different respective degrees) each suffered from this kind of overshooting complexity. Ignorance hones in on a few important topics, and does so in an clean, hierarchical way. The plot is simple and intriguing. The parallels with Odysseus and his Great Return to Ithaca are the next level his themeatic hierarchy. Overarching everything is, unsurprisingly, the idea of ignorance itself--what it means to be apart from something, to be out of contact, to be without knowledge, to forget. These thematic levels are delightfully undistorted in Ignorance, making for a much more clearheaded read. Kundera gets back to basics with literary devices as well. The history of Europe, and especially of Bohemia, has been crucial in his best work, and it comes back to the forefront here. Communism and capitalism and their effects on interpersonal relationships is brought back into the fold as well. Explicating a theme via etymology is another old Kundera trick that is fruitfully taken advantage of in Ignorance. While it's hard to capture in 200 pages what took his earlier novels 500, there is no doubt that Kundera has come back into his own with Ignorance. It's an indispensible addition to any Kundera fan's collection, and it's well organized and lucidly aesthetic enough to serve as a first exposure to Kundera as well.
Rating:
Summary: ignorance is not bliss
Review: In the quixotic lands of literature the latest dragon to be slain is nostalgia. Kundera, in this slim volume (whose size and typographical rendition seem to irk some readers), takes up the sword in the pointed form of an authorial interjection honed on the story of "Odysseus" as the embodiment of all Great Returns. Kundera's retelling of Odysseus's homecoming and his musings on the nature of homesickness disrupts the traditional harmony of the novel's narrative -- that siren song we expect in the story we think we should be reading. In this sense, we the readers become somewhat distanced from the characters -- cut off, as they seem to be cut off from themselves and from understanding their own stories. The plot, if your standard for plots is Dickensian, is certainly thin. The story unfolds as a man and a woman meet by chance on their way back to a homeland they have separately abandoned twenty years before as exiles. On their return, they find the people they left behind strangers, which is to be expected. The twist comes from a compounding of their "homelessness," a state in which they find themselves suddenly in exile again -- displaced not only from their intricate memories of their homeland, but also from their more recent recollections of a life lived in a different place and in a different language. The effect of this psychological refraction is much like that of the spatial illusions achieved by tessellation in an Escher print. Underlying their psychological adventures of these characters, of course, is history in Europe -- which is the real protagonist here. The nostalgia Kundera seems to battle with is much greater than that of Josef or Irena, the two exiles in the narrative. Kundera is wrestling with the fiery dragon of the romantic legacy in which identity was always rooted in the fertile soil of a distinct homeland from which one was sprung and for which one was willing to die. What Kundera is asking is this: Is it even possible to talk of such distinct things as homelands in an age in which revolutions, wars, uprisings, and globalization -- in other words, rapid and radical change makes any notion of a Great Return -- that going home again -- impossible? Change, he implies has become as ubiquitous as a shopping mall. To make his point, he invokes Schoenberbg, who feared radio for its ubiquity in which it "'forcefeeds us music ... regardless of whether we want to hear it, or whether we can grasp it,' with the result that music becomes just noise, a noise among other noises." Those who read to escape their world, will find nothing soothing in this book; those who read to understand it better, will have heard another voice weigh in on what it is like to live mindful -- and not in ignorance -- of the 21st century. They will also see that the romantic writer is still very much at work here: for here is the impossible -- the novel, unmoored from place and plot, optimistically forging a new form for literature. One only has to look at the work of other writers, such as W.G. Sebald, to understand that the trend of the novel divested of the elements of the enchantment of place and character is already becoming a tradition.
Rating:
Summary: VERY GOOD
Review: It is precisely Milan Kundera's reputation, his name if you like, that causes readers to bring to "Ignorance" unrealistic expectations and irrelevant preconceived notions. This is NOT one of Milan Kundera's best three novels; it is nevertheless a VERY GOOD novel (or story or novella or whatever you wish to call it). (It is possible that the fame of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" has caused "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" to be read by some unable to appreciate it who nevertheless feel constrained to say they like it.) "Ignorance" is like "The Old Man and the Sea" and "Gigi" AT LEAST in that all three are short, and if one contends that length in and of itself (getting your money's worth in black ink) is a value then one should for the sake of consistency deride "The Old Man and the Sea" and "Gigi" as much as "Ignorance." Judging a work in its own terms means not faulting "Ignorance" for neglecting to describe the physical appearance of its characters where that would be irrelevant (as Kundera, and Kafka too, characteristically do not) and not faulting Milan Kundera from commenting on his own characters and story (for "showing, not telling") -- which he does to a significantly greater extent in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", by the way. Not all the precepts one may have memorized, without necessarily understanding, in English 101 apply -- precisely because Milan Kundera has the imagination and originality to transcend them.
Rating:
Summary: Coming Home: Reflections of an Émigré
Review: Kundera cleverly joins the story of Odysseus with his own musings of coming home and the dread that such a scenario provides. Once again, we see Kundera distract us with unrealistic love affairs while he diverts our attention from the musings related to fate, history and nostalgia. Ignorance, unfortunately seems hurried and in the end doubtless this book will produce in his most ardent supporters a nostalgia for Kundera at his most profound. Although the "intrusive author" technique for which Kundera is famous for is all over this book, it seems to lack the density of such books as The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality. Josef and Irena return to Prague after an extended absence. Josef returns to form some closure in relation to his deceased wife. Conversely, Irena is convinced by a friend that it would be exciting to return to Prague after all these years. Both find much like Odysseus that they are returning to a very different "home." Both sink into each others arms in a hurried episode of lovemaking that somewhat reflects the disappointment of the journey home. Kundera's last three books: Identity, Slowness, and Ignorance do not have the same complexity as the major works like The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and Immortality. It is as if the writer is tired and simply revisiting his old themes - remembering, history, and unrealistic affairs - affairs that are only possible in the imaginary space of fiction. Although it is the hallmark of Kundera's genius to blend the historical (Oedipus, etc. - in this case Odysseus) there does not seem to be anything REALLY original in this work. As mentioned earlier, it leaves me nostalgic for Kundera at his most profound and most playful. Miguel Llora
Rating:
Summary: Coming Home: Reflections of an Émigré
Review: Kundera cleverly joins the story of Odysseus with his own musings of coming home and the dread that such a scenario provides. Once again, we see Kundera distract us with unrealistic love affairs while he diverts our attention from the musings related to fate, history and nostalgia. Ignorance, unfortunately seems hurried and in the end doubtless this book will produce in his most ardent supporters a nostalgia for Kundera at his most profound. Although the "intrusive author" technique for which Kundera is famous for is all over this book, it seems to lack the density of such books as The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Immortality. Josef and Irena return to Prague after an extended absence. Josef returns to form some closure in relation to his deceased wife. Conversely, Irena is convinced by a friend that it would be exciting to return to Prague after all these years. Both find much like Odysseus that they are returning to a very different "home." Both sink into each others arms in a hurried episode of lovemaking that somewhat reflects the disappointment of the journey home. Kundera's last three books: Identity, Slowness, and Ignorance do not have the same complexity as the major works like The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and Immortality. It is as if the writer is tired and simply revisiting his old themes - remembering, history, and unrealistic affairs - affairs that are only possible in the imaginary space of fiction. Although it is the hallmark of Kundera's genius to blend the historical (Oedipus, etc. - in this case Odysseus) there does not seem to be anything REALLY original in this work. As mentioned earlier, it leaves me nostalgic for Kundera at his most profound and most playful. Miguel Llora
Rating:
Summary: An impressive return to form
Review: Kundera the master has returned at last in this gripping, concise, and moving account of a disastrous homecoming. Irena, back in Prague after years as an emigre in Paris, scarcely recognizes the city she once knew. She finds the pervasive kitsch of a burgeoning free market appalling. Meanwhile her partner, Gustaf, revels in Prague's awakening from the nightmare of communism and walks the lively streets convinced that he has finally found his city of dreams. Irena's Great Return, connected in the novel to Odysseus's rapturous homecoming in the Odyssey, confirms the "emigration nightmares" she suffered from in Paris. Aggressively cheerful former friends, gathered to welcome her back, order beer instead of drinking the fine wine she has brought them. They seem to want to cut her off from her years in Paris, to amputate the life she had there, and to join the distant past with the present. Though she resists this attempted amputation, she succumbs to the wish to revisit the past, in the form of a rendezvous with Josef, whom she flirted with briefly in a bar as a young woman. He has forgotten her, but he plays along treacherously, and their lopsided and brief affair culminates in an explosion of eroticism, followed by tears as Irena discovers that Josef means more to her than she to him. Kundera brilliantly weaves the theme of ignorance into this short novel: our identities are dependent on memory, but memory is so pitifully fragile that the self is condemned to an unbearable lightness. Josef, faithful to the memory of his dead wife, abandons Irena with terrifying detachment. His act is all the more poignant because Kundera, with is customary dexterity, has juxtaposed this scene with a parallel betrayal. Along with Irena, the reader must face the longing, and ultimate inability, to return. An ingenious architecture constructed out of philosophical meditations, etymologies, delicate observations, and moving love scenes--an impressive return to form for the Franco-Czech master.
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