Rating: 
Summary: Hmmmm...Nice...
Review: Kundera's newest novel, Ignorance, follows themes similar to several of his other novels, with the concentration of this one on nostalgia, on what people believe they should be feeling at a given moment even when they are not, and on how the decisions we make at the "Age of Ignorance" (or in our late teens/early twenties) affect our lives when we come to know and understand ourselves better later in life. Intermixed with these themes is the story of Odysseus' travels in the Odyssey and how it parallels the Great Return home of each of the characters.The story is about two Czech émigrés who left during the Communist era and are now returning to Czech for the first time since the Communist regime ended in 1989. During Irena's return, she realizes how people have come to accept her as an émigré who left instead of staying loyal to her country. As she meets with her old Czech friends, she realizes the terms of their acceptance. They want to know nothing about her life outside the country. They want to amputate it, as she puts it, and by doing so, make her the same as them. Josef, on the other hand, returns to visit his family and revisits an old diary of his childhood. He marvels at the character he once was with distaste - how could he have been that creature, who seems so different from who he is now? These two émigrés end up meeting by chance to continue an old romance that neither of them accurately remembers. One of the main themes of the book is the terms and conditions by which people accept another as one of their own. They look for similarities, memories they can both reminisce together, even if they both share a different perception of what actually occurred. After all, no two people share the same memories, which fade with time. Often people don't even remember themselves for who they were, and reading old writings, they ask themselves how this writer could have possibly been them at one point. People change, but others don't see them for who they are now. Only who they once knew, or as Kundera puts it "a reality no longer is what it was when it was it cannot be reconstructed." I always walk away from a Kundera book thinking a little differently about life, and while many of the ideas in this book have been written about in greater detail in his other books, I still enjoyed it as a quick read/refresher.
Rating: 
Summary: On returning home
Review: Milan Kundera continues his exploration of the most basic of human emotions in this brief novel that addresses how we deal with memory, internalization of fear of failure, and fear of commitment. Though the story of IGNORANCE revolves around two people who return to Prague after an extended exile from their homeland due to the seemingly constant political upheavals and displacements of the 20th century global events, the core of this story encourages us to examine our fantasies of our past, our idealized childhood and first love experiences, and our vulnerabilities about aging, about returning to the 'home' we have altered to such a degree by distance and memory conflicts. Kundera manages to capture the fragile spaces in his characters' minds and psyches and in doing so he holds a mirror up to his readers. What were our formative years really like? Can we recapture idealized pasts by returning to them? The sad answers are 'no', we can't go home again. Life and our accompanying maturity alters everything - places, old comrades, old loves, old hopes and pain. Though this book is a quick read, easily an evening's read, it distills many sharply focused matters of life as we have lived it and life as we continue to grow. This is thought-provoking book, well written, and a must for lovers of Kundera's style.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful
Review: One of my personal favorite authors does it again with Ignorance, a powerful, resonating book about leaving home, coming back again, relationships, eroticism, family and history. This sunk in on several levels, and I would highly recommend it to friends and writers.
Rating:
Summary: Powerful
Review: One of my personal favorite authors does it again with Ignorance, a powerful, resonating book about leaving home, coming back again, relationships, eroticism, family and history. This sunk in on several levels, and I would highly recommend it to friends and writers.
Rating: 
Summary: Seminal but easy reading
Review: The aim of a author through the device of a novel can be varied. Most of the fiction-writers set out to entertain, ensorcelling the readers with gripping plot, brilliant prose, standout characters, heroic deeds, tragedy..; A few eschew the pulp style and follow their own trademarks. Whatever, the key is the author of fiction aims to tell a story.
But, Kundera has fashioned a unique style of narration. Story is purely incidental and a prop for him to elucidiate his ideas of human emotions, probe the mysteries of its thought process, explore the never ending allure of a man-woman attraction. Ignorance revolves around the theme of nostalgia-the love and mixed feelings an imigrant feels for his home-land, the ambivalence it brings with it; Memory is the other mystery which Ignorance delves into.
For people looking for thrills of fiction, this book is not for you. For the Kundera regular, ignorance would be a fine read; For others, my suggestion would be to give it a try. The best part of it is, it is a short book, a easy read (no humungous sentences, even though it deals with emotions which cannot be fit into words) and a very different book.
Some of the things that struck me: - What does one feel when reading the jottings of old diaries? Things which seem important at that instant, prompting copious entries in the diary, looks very insignificant when looked at many years later. I get this feeling whenever i read mine. It gives a funny feeling too. Kundera captures Joseph's awkwardness during the time he reads his school diaries. - Memory. We cannot and are not designed to remember everything we went through in our lives, though we may believe so. As MK puts it "memory retains not more than a millionth, a hundred millionth, in short an utterly infinitesimal bit of the lived life. That fact too is a part of the essence of man. If someone could retain in his memory everything he had experienced, if he could at anytime call up any fragment of his past, he would be nothing like human beings. neither his loves, nor his friendships, nor his angers nor his capacity ro forgive or avenge would resemble ours".
And a few more gems on memory:
" For what can memory do? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will , or our intrests.
"We won't understand a thing about human life, if we persist in avoiding the most abvious fact: A reality no longer is what it was when it was ; it cannot be reconstructed" - What happens when two people meet after a long time? In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience. The same recollections. The same recollections?? That's where the misunderstanding starts. They don't have the same recollections. - on radio by Arnold schoenberg : Radio is an enemy, a ruthless enemy marching irresistibly forward and any resistance is hopeless; 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. If in the past, people would listen to music out of love for music nowadays it roars everywhere and all the time, regardless of whether we want to hear it or not. - on Men gets seduced: Men, having appropriated for themselves the role of seducers , they never even consider any women but the ones they might desire; the idea doesn't occur to them that a woman who is ugly or old, or who simply stands outside their own erotic imaginings, might want to possess them.
Nostalgia does not heighten memory's activity, it does not awaken recollections; it suffices unto itself, unto its own feelings, so fully absorbed is it by its suffering and nothing else. - on Montony: When she is older she will see in these resemblances a regrettable uniformity among individuals (they all stop at the same spots to kiss, have the same tastes in clothing, flatter a woman with the same metaphor) and a tedious monotony among events (they are all just an endless repetition of the same one), but in her adoloscence she welcomes these conicidences as miraculous and she is avid to decipher their meanings. I am giving it three points only, because despite all this incisive observations wrapped around a story, ignorance will probably not standout in my memory (pun unintended). It is not a book which can be savoured repeatedly. But, do try it once. cheers
-raj
Rating:
Summary: Chartering familiar territories
Review: The way Kundera crafts his characters in his recent novellas (Ignorance, Identity, and Slowness) reminds me of John Berger's critique of the contemporary painter Francis Bacon. According to Berger, paintings of Bacon are based on his initial brush strokes. The form, texture, and color of the initial strokes form a motif, and from this motif Bacon constructs an entire painting. Likewise for Kundera with his characters. Initially I suspect there are Kundera's observations on human psychology, on how human beings react to various situations and ideas. Kundera builds on these observations ("brush strokes"). A few observations makes up a character. Draw analogies from the classics with few of such characters, and a novel is born. The situation and idea Kundera explores in this novel are that of an emigre, and of nostalgia, memory. The classical analogy is drawn from the relationship between Odysseus and Penelope in Homer's Odyssey. It is amazing how much we think we know of people by knowing no more than how they react to certain events, and this is precisely where Kundera's genius lies. In Ignorance, we are given almost no factual information -- for e.g. occupation, age, physical traits such as height, hair color, eye color, etc -- regarding the two main characters Josef and Irena, yet we get to think that we know them very well by listening to how they feel about being an emigre (from Czech to France), and how they felt about their respective deceased spouses. The keen, humorous, and at times ironic, observations Kundera makes of Josef's and Irena's psychology are, as was the case in his previous novels, no less than captivating. My complaint of the book lies in its indistinguishablity from Kundera's previous work. There is nothing new in structure nor in content that would make you excited about this book should you be a Kundera follower. On the other hand, if this is your first Kundera, I think it worthwhile reading. Ignorance is as good as any of Kundera's recent novellas.
Rating: 
Summary: Reader, Pass By
Review: There is one shelf I reserve for books in my collection that are my absolute favorite contemporary works; The Unbearable Lightness of Being is on this shelf. 'Ignorance', unfortunately, is nowhere near that class of book. Like 'Identity' and 'Slowness', the type is way too large, the margins way too wide, the price way too high for a book whose landscapes and interiors are mostly white space, whose characters are virtually featureless and faceless, and whose prose is bland enough to match. Gone, except in a few sentences, is the lyricism of the old Kundera; gone, except for the stray paragraph or two, his intriguing meditations (the meditations you will find are generally hollow and predictable); gone the characters who had more substance than some of the people you might bump into in a local tavern on a Friday night. Supposedly a novel about exile and memory, return and disillusionment, 'Ignorance' centers on Irena, a Czech emigre, who is returning to her homeland after 20 years in France. At the airport in Paris she bumps into Josef, a Czech exile living in Copenhagen. The two arrange to meet again in Prague and, predictably enough, it turns out to they already have a history of criss-crossing paths. Unbelievably, we have no idea what any of the main characters in this novel look like (the only genuine description of a face in the first 150 pages is on page 39 and it is of a minor player). Nor are there any distinctive voices or personalities. In fact, almost anyone in this book is interchangeable with almost anyone else. With such watered-down prose, such weak characters and observations as platitudinous as "Doesn't N. need Josef to tell him that friendship does exist despite all of history's contortions?" there is not much here worth reading. Indeed, this statement about friendship is fairly symptomatic of the whole novel: we are constantly TOLD things without being SHOWN things. We never experience the friendship between N. and Josef, it is merely a murmur from his past. Having never felt or seen or been exposed to Josef's or Irena's former existence, it is impossible for us to feel much upon their return. A far more believable, far more moving account of exile and return is Paul West's 'The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests'. In West's book, a Hopi Indian, seduced first by the lure of Hollywood's film industry and then foolish enough to voluntarily serve in the jungle inferno of Vietnam, returns to the arid mesa and to a people whose ways and traditions he can barely recognize. Uniquely compelling, West's depiction of this struggle to reconcile ancestral rhythms with the Anglo culture laid over them like sod, displays astonishing depth and stunning insight. As for the constellation made up of terms such as coincidence, chance and destiny, you are much better off with Jose Saramago's 'All the Names,' in which a clerk in the Central Registry becomes obsessed with discovering more about the woman whose birth certificate-one of thousands-he comes across accidentally. A single page of Saramago's book will make clear why Saramago won the Nobel Prize and why Kundera, on his present course, will not. 'Ignorance' is one more Kundera work, bloated to novel size, which hardly ranks with his early books, which will disappoint all but the most desperate Kundera fans and which would more properly be titled 'Laziness'.
Rating:
Summary: A beautiful book.
Review: This book challenges the Unbearable Lightness of Being for the place of my absolute favorite Kundera novel. Never before has a book left me breathless, shaking, and at an utter loss for words. The writing is the most tender, and the most cruel that I have encountered thus far. Please, read this; you won't regret it!
Rating:
Summary: Kundera's Great Return
Review: This is a fine return to form for Kundera. His two previous novels, "Slowness" and "Identity" suffered from authorial interjections that bordered on being esoteric, and at worst, willful and pretentious. Kundera has used such narrative technique ever since he started writing, but with his 'French novels', these narrative intrusions seemed trivial and off-putting. Although written in French, "Ignorance" retrieves the thematic verve of Kundera's early great Czech novels. The book deals with themes of nostalgia, memory, and the Great Return, which were also featured prominently in Kundera's earlier novels. The narrative asides that seemed so grating and annoying in his two previous novels seem powerfully relevant here. Even the usual Nietzschean philology that Kundera does that usually rubs me the wrong way is intriguing and meaningful, when in the beginning of the novel Kundera contemplates the word 'nostos' and introduces the theme of nostalgia by the way of Odysseus, then our main characters, Josef and Irena. Both Josef and Irena are emigrants, returning to Czechoslovakia. Both have lost their spouses. Irena has taken up a partner since, but Josef resolves to live as if his wife hasn't really died. The parts describing Josef coping with his wife's death have haunting, lyrical power that's been absent from Kundera's recent, emotionally aloof offerings. They are utterly moving, and even when read apart from the whole novel (Granta #78 excerpted Josef parts of the novel into a short story), it carries an emotional resonance that won't easily detach itself from your mind. The climax of the novel comes towards the end when Josef and Irena meet. All the themes of the novel come together in the aftermath of this meeting, and although it seems typical for Kundera to find an insight to everything in sexual politics, the emotional attach/detachments of these characters seem so real, the recurrent mannerism of the author becomes a secondary issue. The book is slight, compared to Kundera's Czech novels. It is not to say the issues dealt within this book are slight by any means. In "The Art of the Novel", and other interviews, Kundera has explicitly stated his disenchantment with the big novel form, preferring a form that is more concise and comic. With this novel, the concision only crystallises and accentuates the ideas explored by Kundera. Kundera does a fine job of revisiting the old themes of his earlier works, but in the time since those books, many writers have traversed in the same thematic grounds of memory and nostalgia more poignantly, with more immediacy. (One writer, that comes to mind, is the recently deceased W.G. Sebald.) But all it all, this novel is an elegant contemplation by a master of contemporary fiction.
Rating:
Summary: not a "must read", but enjoyable
Review: This is his first book I have read, so I don't know how it compares to "Unbearable Ligthness of Being", but overall I found the book easy to read, and enjoyable. He is good at describing the feelings, and putting into words the emotions of an emigre who is in conflict of going back to his/her mainland. But I found him poor in terms of scheduling the events. Also some of the characters and their meanings are not very well cooked.
That's why I give him 3 stars.
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