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Mar 30, 2007

علی rated it:

کوندرا را به این دلیل بسیار دوست دارم که مرا در چهارچوب بسته ی یک روایت زندانی نمی کند. خواندن کونرا مثل این است که دوستی را پس از سال ها در یک کافه ملاقات کنید و در حالی که به قصه ی روزگار رفته ی او گوش می دهید، قهوه تان را می نوشید، به موسیقی که از بلندگوی کافه پخش می شود، گوش می کنید، گهگاه متوجه ی صحبت ها و خنده هایی از میزهای کناری می شوید، صدای عبور و مرور خیابان در پس پشت این همه جاری ست، دوره گردی چیزی می فروشد، عبور تراموای، و همه چیز، درست مثل خود زندگی، ...
I like Kundra because More...

0 comments like (4 people liked it)

Mar 04, 2008

Kristen rated it:

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0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 15, 2011

Pawan rated it:

http://iandbooks.wordpress.com/
I finished reading “Ignorance” by Milan Kundera and I feel like sharing about the book. I had already written about it before I started reading it.

http://iandbooks.wordpress.com/2011/02/1...

As I was expecting, he has handled this difficult concept in very complex way but it is a great reading. The book looks at the concept of Ignorance from the point of view of Czech expatriates who had left their home country due to communism and have no More...

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Dec 09, 2009

B-MO rated it:

Kundera is my favorite of the slew of authors made famous in the west due to their emigration from and outspoken cries against Soviet Communism. Many of the others (i.e. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) have been "made" great due to the wests need to hear these stories. Kundera just "is" good.

An over arching concept of the book is the comparison of a modern day homecoming (post cold war, pre myspace) with that of Odysseus returning to Greece. However, don't feel like you h More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 10, 2012

Giulia rated it:

”In spagnolo, añoranza viene dal verbo añorar («provare nostalgia»), che viene dal verbo catalano enyorar, a sua volta derivato dal latino ignorare. Alla luce di questa etimologia, la nostalgia appare come la sofferenza dell’ignoranza. Tu sei lontano, e io non so che ne è di te. Il mio paese è lontano, e io non so cosa succede laggiù."

Irena e Josef si incontrano per caso. Il loro incontro dura pochissimo, il tempo di iniziare una storia d’amore e di considerarla finita senza ave More...

14 comments like (7 people liked it)

Feb 24, 2011

Mike rated it:

Milan Kundera has one of the most unique and immediately recognizable writing styles I’ve ever encountered. Ignorance is the third of his novels I’ve read, and there was never any doubt in my mind while reading it that, yep, it’s him all right. I find this experience of familiarity with an author quite pleasant. The other two novels of his that I’ve read (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) are “better,” I suppose it ought to be said, but Ignorance is another More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 21, 2007

Vanessa rated it:

I used my last 10 dollars to buy this book instead of groceries and never regretted it. Kundera refers alot to his personal life in this book. Both him and the main characters were deal with returning to your mother country after being away for so long and the memories you hold. The way Kundera deals with memories is superb and thought invoking. Although simple in language Kundera bring alive the feelings and emotions people have being away from their homeland.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 27, 2011

Fatema rated it:

لا أدري كم مرّة عدتُ لصفحة الغلاف، لأتأكد من كلمة "رواية" موجودة بكل ثقة ..؟!
أثناء القراءة –وهي تجربة جميلة جدا- بدا لي أن الكتاب عبارة عن عمل فلسفي كتب بطريقة قصصية شيّقة، وليس العكس، أعني لم يبدو الأمر أني أقرأ نصا سرديّا غنيّا بالفلسفة، والغوص "النفسي" العميق، والأفكار المُدهشة. مساحة السرد والوصف تتراجع، دون أن يختفي وهجُ حضورها.
"يتكشّف لنا الحنين على أنه ألم الجهل" يقول كونديرا، الذي يتحدّث عن العودة بطريقةٍ فاتنة.
"النهار يُضاء بجمال الب More...

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Jul 24, 2008

Danika rated it:

I haven't read anything by this author in years, so it's hard for me to compare this with some of his older works. All in all, I really liked how it played with the past, present and future. I think a more appropriate title might be include the word "nostalgia". It gives a good perspective on being an emigre and the main character leaves the Czech Republic for France, as Kundera himself did. A lot of the characters are very lonely. Super fast read.

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jul 31, 2011

Eduardo rated it:

Ignorance is a fictionalized essay on nostalgia, on the desire to return (to places, people, and situations long past). Published in 2000, about 20 years after Kundera himself emigrated to France from his native Czech Republic, the novel tells the story of two characters who had the same experience. The time is the early 1990s, right after the demise of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and Josef and Irena (two Czech expatriates living in Denmark and France, respectively) feel the need to More...

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Aug 29, 2010

Karen rated it:

The woman working behind the counter at the SFO bookstore had round warts or bumps the size of dimes and nickels covering her face and arms. I skipped to the front of the line, "I just have a question," pissed that I couldn't find a book that had plenty of sex in it, but didn't have a title written in lipstick. "Do you have any Kundera novels shelved somewhere other than just there with the rest of the fiction?" I realize now that I was trying to find In the Skin of a Lion More...

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Jul 30, 2010

Zoë rated it:

"And there lies the horror: the past we remember is devoid of time. Impossible to reexperience a love the way we reread a book or resee a movie."

Ignorance is the first book I have read by Milan Kundera, author of the Incredible Lightness of Being. The focus of Ignorance is two people, Josef and Irena, who flee Czechoslovakia when it is taken over by the Soviets and for more than twenty years make new lives as immigrants in Copenhagen and Paris, respectively. After two d More...

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Aug 08, 2009

Ramin rated it:

A week ago I chose this over other books I want to read, simply because it is thin and easily fit into my laptop bag, which was crammed with other stuff on my move across the ocean. Coincidentally, as I was returning to the country in which I was raised, I was reading this book about the joys and difficulties two people experience as they return to the country in which they were raised. (The parallel ends there.)

The main characters, Irena and Josef, had fled Czechoslovakia and rema More...

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Jan 15, 2011

Yasmine rated it:

I was thinking while reading this book about the rating I'll give it… I was going to give it a 4-star rating wishing it could it be 4.5 stars. But while reading the last 50 pages, I definitely knew I was going to give it a 5, and quite easily, too. The ideas represented about art, history, music, writing, and philosophy in this book are probably more worthy of attention and reading than the main story. And the main story got amazingly better near the end which made me wish the story would go on; More...

6 comments like (4 people liked it)

Mar 09, 2010

Bartley rated it:

"I imagine the feelings of two people meeting again after many years. 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; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don't intersect; and even in terms of quantity they are More...

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Oct 19, 2011

Patrick rated it:

Milan Kundera is one of my favorite contemporary writers and after reading Ignorance (2002) it is clear why. He is one of the few writers writing today, that writes about ideas, big ideas like the meaning of life, love, exile and so on (another notable exception is Michel Hollenbeq). This book is about two former Czech exiles that were once connected in their youth who return to Prague after the velvet revolution and come to terms with their pasts and with those who stayed behind. There are a nu More...

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Sep 14, 2011

Fahad rated it:

الجهل

يرقد الكتاب على مكتبي منذ انتهيت منه منذ ثلاثة أسابيع تقريبا ً، لم أجد وقتا ً لأكتب عنه، فلذا عندما أعود إليه الآن، أشعر كمن يعود إلى وجبة بائتة.

الرواية تعالج فكرة الحنين إلى الوطن، وإمكانية العودة إليه لدى المنفيين، وخاصة بعدما تزول أسباب النفي، أظن أن الفكرة طرحت نفسها بقوة على كونديرا المنفي في فرنسا، بعد سقوط الاتحاد السوفييتي، واستقلال بلده التشيك.

يستخدم كونديرا أسلوبه المميز الذي يمزج فيه ما بين الرواية والتقرير، حيث يحكي قصة تشيكيان رجل وا More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 18, 2009

Kevin rated it:

"I imagine the feelings of two people meeting again after many years. 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; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don't intersect; and even in terms of quantity they are not c More...

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Aug 06, 2011

Tida rated it:

I have a biased in czech writers. I don't know, I just find them very interesting. Kundera, to me, is still one of the foremost czech writer alive. This is actually my first Kundera book that I've read. After prolonging in one particular writer for such a long time, I finally decided to move on. So here I am, still ended up in his sensitivity, and in his sense of longing. His cunning skill in depicting any situation and human relations really caught me in my depth.

I won't go through More...

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Jan 13, 2010

Jules rated it:

It's a pity I was so distracted when reading this book, as I am sure I would have appreciated it a whole lot more if I hadn't been.

The book talks about the return of 2 people to their native country after emigrating away, and the feelings of nostalgia and memories they bring back to the surface when they are there.

This was my first novel by Milan Kundera. I am not sure if his style of writing really suits what I look for in a book, but he is most definitely a brilliant w More...

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Aug 13, 2009

Juju rated it:

To me, Milan Kundera's novels are more like longform essay meditations which happen to read as stories. "In that etymological light nostalgia seems like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing" and this book could've easily been called Nostalgia. The text spoke eloquently about desire and memory, as in my memories of the other books I've read by Kundera, and about my present experience of some remembered past. For two Czech emigres, displaced by the Russian occupation of 1969, the que More...

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Jun 07, 2011

kasia rated it:

I read this in college and had remembered it as being fantastic, a really incredible evocation of immigration and return, coupled with a kind of interesting romance between two people who don't really know each other. Re-reading it, I was somewhat disappointed - it's not nearly as good as I'd remembered. It's an amusing novel, but it seems a bit overdone and repetitive. The whole Eastern European immigrant aspect strikes me as cliche now, maybe because I'd encountered it many times since then, n More...

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May 27, 2010

Jeff rated it:

A fascinating read, styisticly minimal and efficient, whose structure questioned the very assuptions that arose from the work. Based arond the themes of homecoming and memory, Kundera is able to write direct commentary on myth and philosophy whilst weaving his ideas into the lives of his two emigrees who eventually return to Eastern Europe after the fall of communism. The gap between the fantasy and reality of homecoming in constituted by the ways in which they have constructed their memories an More...

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Jan 04, 2009

bup rated it:

I feel like Kundera didn't finish the book. It feels like he just got to someplace where one minor plot got resolved and stopped.

Still, I always like his disarming writing style. Normally I dislike 'meta-writing' where the author mentions him or herself, but with Kundera, it works. He acknowledges the impossibility of completely immersing the reader in his world, and it comes across as refreshing, or as I characterized it above, disarming. Somehow it doesn't come across as self-satis More...

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Aug 07, 2011

Roberto added it

Colli once wrote that after Nietzsche philosphy was dead, because all philosophers were forced to ask themselves the same questions as Nieztsche. In a way he was right, because the posterior philosphies cannot strive for an all encompassing ethics. Kundera, however, brings emotions to a philosophical plain. The result is a short novel of profound implications. This is one of those books that you can read every now and then, and find new meaning in it, and although there is no pre-requisites for More...

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Jun 19, 2010

Sahar rated it:

من ترجمه آرش حجازی از این کتاب رو خوندم و چون تموم کتابهای کوندرا رو با ترجمه فروغ پوریاوی خوندم ترجمه ایشون رو برای کتابهای کوندرا ترجیح میدادم
جالبه دقیقا همون احساسی رو که من در مورد خاطرات دوران کودکیم دارم و تمایل شدید به تجربه اون روزا و اینکه بارها تجربه کردم که دیگه اون تجربه در حال
تکرار پذیر نیست همه رو دیدم تو این کتاب
More...

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Dec 15, 2009

Maryam rated it:

اوليس در سرزمين كاليپسو واقعا زندگي شيرين،راحت و شادي داشت.و با اين حال،بين آن زندگي شيرين در غربت و بازگشت پرخطر به وطن،بازگشت را انتخاب كرد.به جاي جست و جوي ناشناخته(ماجرا)،قداست بخشيدن به شناخته شده(بازگشت)راانتخاب كرد.به جاي پايان ناپذير(زيرا ماجرا ميل به تمام شدن ندارد)پايان پذير را برگزيد(زيرا كه بازگشت آشتي با محدوديت زندگي است More...

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Oct 13, 2011

Hoda rated it:

كتاب خوبي بود. البته به پاي سبكي تحمل ناپذير هستي از همين نويسنده نميرسيد. يك قسمتهاييش رو تجربه كرده بودم. چيزي مثل فصل 22 تا چند فصل بعدش رو.اين تجربه ها مشتركه. چون همه تو انسان بودن اشتراك داريم، سواي جزئيات فرديمون.
از سبك اين كتاب هاي اينچنيني خوشم مياد كه روح يك انسان رو تا حد ممكن شفاف و واضح نشون ميده. بدون دروغهاي روزمره اي كه آدم به خودش ميگه. گاهي هم كمك ميكنه به خودشناسي... More...

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May 03, 2009

Eleanor rated it:

I carried this book around Eastern Europe, hoping that it would lend some insight into Prauge. It didn't, but it was a very tightly written story of two people who come back to the Czech Republic after emigrating under Communism. I think this book is a profound meditation on the meaning of home and belonging and that touched me more than the love story parts. I also liked the description of how capitalism came back to Prague with an energetic vengeance. I could certainly see clear evidence of th More...

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Jan 19, 2011

Rowena rated it:

it was okay. i think this is one of those things that sound like a good idea but never really come out right. the characters were a bit too strange sometimes, like josef being actively in love with his dead wife, and irena's mother, wtf?

"And he? He was living beneath a sky that had nothing to do with her. He no longer sought him out, she no longer sought him out. Recalling him awakened neither love nor hatred in her. At the thought of him, she was as if anesthetized - with no idea More...

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