MILAN KUNDERA, IGNORANCE

ABOUT THE WRITER

Milan Kundera is a Czech-born writer who lives in exile in France since 1975, having become a
naturalised citizen in 1981. He "sees himself as a French writer and insists his work should be
studied as French literature and classified as such in book stores.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Kunderas 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 migrs who left during the Communist era and are now
returning to Czech for the first time since the Communist regime ended in 1989. During Irenas
return, she realizes how people have come to accept her as an migr 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 migrs 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 dont 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 dont 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.