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الجهل

Milan Kundera,

ميلان كونديرا

3.78 · Rating details · 17,836 ratings · 1,272 reviews

اضطربت قليلا حين زف اليها جوستف فخورا بعد عدة اسابيع خبرا طيبا: أقترح على شركته ان تفتح فرعا في براغ الدول الشيوعية ليست جذابة اقتصاديا سيكون الفرع متواضعا مع ذلك ستتاح الفرصة للذهاب إلى هناك من وقت لآخر. – أنا سعيد بالتواصل مع مدينتك” ، يقول بدلا من ان تفرح احسست بتهديد غامض
مدينتى ؟ براغ لم تعد مدينتى اجبت – كيف ، يقول مستاء. لم تخف عنه قط ما تفكر فيه كان لديه إذن امكاني ...more

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Paperback, 130 pages

Published (first published April 2000)

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Oct 04, 2010 Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, 1001-book, 21th-century, novels, czech

57. L'ignorance = Ignorance, Milan Kundera

Czech expatriate Irena, who has been living in France, decides to return to her home after twenty years. During the trip she meets, by chance, Josef, a fellow émigré who was briefly her lover in Prague. The novel examines the feelings instigated by the return to a homeland, which has ceased to be a home. In doing so, it reworks the Odyssean themes of homecoming. It paints a poignant picture of love and its manifestations, a recurring theme in Kundera's n 57. L'ignorance = Ignorance, Milan Kundera

Czech expatriate Irena, who has been living in France, decides to return to her home after twenty years. During the trip she meets, by chance, Josef, a fellow émigré who was briefly her lover in Prague. The novel examines the feelings instigated by the return to a homeland, which has ceased to be a home. In doing so, it reworks the Odyssean themes of homecoming. It paints a poignant picture of love and its manifestations, a recurring theme in Kundera's novels.

The novel explores and centres around the way that people have selective memories as a precursor to ignorance. The concept of ignorance is presented as a two-fold phenomenon; in which ignorance can be a willing action that people participate in, such as avoiding unpleasant conversation topics or acting out. Yet also exploring the involuntary aspects of being ignorant, such as feigning ignorance of the past or avoiding the truth.

عنوانها: جهالت؛ بی‌خبری؛ نوشته: میلان کوندرا؛ (روشنگران) ادبیات؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: روز هشتم ماه سپتامبر سال 2004 و بار دیگر ماه آوریل سال 2006 میلادی

عنوان: جهالت؛ نوشته: میلان کوندرا؛ مترجم: آرش حجازی؛ مشخصات نشر: تهران، کاروان، 1384، در 202 ص، شابک: 9789647033183؛ موضوع: داستانهای نویسندگان چک سده 20 م

عنوان: بی خبری؛ نوشته: میلان کوندرا؛ مترجم: فروغ پوریاوری؛ مشخصات نشر: تهران، روشنگران، 1385، در 173 ص، شابک 9648564248؛

عنوان: بی خبری؛ نوشته: میلان کوندرا؛ مترجم: میترا میرشکار؛ مشخصات نشر: تهران، علم، 1391، در 172 ص، شابک: 9789642244331؛

جهالت دهمین رمان «میلان کوندرا»، نویسنده ی «چک - فرانسوی» است؛ که در سال 1999 میلادی، کتاب را به زبان فرانسوی نوشته، و نخستین بار در سال 2000 میلادی چاپ شده‌ است. ترجمه ی انگلیسی این رمان، برنده ی جایزه ی «اسکات مونکریف» شد. مضمون این داستان درباره ی مهاجرت، غربت و نوستالژی است. این کتاب در ایران، نخستین بار با ترجمه ی جناب آقای: «آرش حجازی»، توسط نشر کاروان، منتشر شده است. نقل از متن: «کوچ پرندگان را دیده‌ ام و شنیده‌ ام. آن‌ها می‌‌روند به دیاری دیگر، برای یافتن آب و دانه، و در این میان باز می‌گردند به سرزمین‌شان...»؛ پایان نقل. ا. شربیانی ...more

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Jan 05, 2013 Ahmad Sharabiani rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: czech, philosophy, european, literature

(57 From 1001 Books) - La Ignoranica = Ignorance, Milan Kundera

Ignorance is a novel by Milan Kundera. It was written in 1999 in French and published in 2000. It was translated into English in 2002 by Linda Asher, for which she was awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize the following year.

Czech expatriate Irena, who has been living in France, decides to return to her home after twenty years. During the trip she meets, by chance, Josef, a fellow émigré who was briefly her lover in Prague.

The novel exa (57 From 1001 Books) - La Ignoranica = Ignorance, Milan Kundera

Ignorance is a novel by Milan Kundera. It was written in 1999 in French and published in 2000. It was translated into English in 2002 by Linda Asher, for which she was awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize the following year.

Czech expatriate Irena, who has been living in France, decides to return to her home after twenty years. During the trip she meets, by chance, Josef, a fellow émigré who was briefly her lover in Prague.

The novel examines the feelings instigated by the return to a homeland, which has ceased to be a home. In doing so, it reworks the Odyssean themes of homecoming. It paints a poignant picture of love and its manifestations, a recurring theme in Kundera's novels.

The novel explores and centers around the way that people have selective memories as a precursor to ignorance. The concept of ignorance is presented as a two-fold phenomenon; in which ignorance can be a willing action that people participate in, such as avoiding unpleasant conversation topics or acting out. Yet also exploring the involuntary aspects of being ignorant, such as feigning ignorance of the past or avoiding the truth.

عنوانها: «بی‌خبری»؛ «جهالت»؛ نویسمده میلان کوندرا؛ انتشاراتیها (روشنگران و کاروان) ادبیات؛ تاریخ نخستین خوانش: ماه آوریل سال 2006میلادی

عنوان: بیخبری؛ نویسنده: میلان کوندرا؛ مترجم: میترا میرشکار؛ تهران، انتشارات علم، 1391؛ در 172ص؛ شابک 9789642244331؛ موضوع داستانهای نویسندگان چک - سده 20م

عنوان: بیخبری؛ نویسنده: میلان کوندرا؛ مترجم: فروغ پوریاوری؛ تهران، انتشارات روشنگران، چاپ دوم 1385؛ در 173ص؛ شابک 9648564248؛

عنوان: جهالت؛ نویسنده: میلان کوندرا؛ مترجم: آرش حجازی؛ تهران، کاروان، 1380؛ در 202ص؛ شابک 9647033184؛ چاپ سوم و چهارم 1381؛ پنجم 1382؛ چاپ نهم 1387؛

دو مهاجر چک‌ «ایرنا» و «یوزف»، پس‌ از بیست‌ سال‌ به‌ کشور خود باز می‌گردند، در فرودگاه‌ «پاریس‌» باهم‌ دیدار‌ می‌کنند؛ «ایرنا» به‌ یاد می‌آورد که‌ زمانی‌ در جوانی، عاشق‌ «یوزف‌» بوده است؛ اما «یوزف‌» هیچ‌ یادمانی‌ از «ایرنا» ندارد؛ در خلال‌ آن دیدار‌ عاشقانه، روشن‌ می‌شود که‌ حتی خودشان‌ هم‌ به‌ یاد نمی‌آورند چه کسی بوده ‌اند، و اکنون‌ کی‌ هستند؛ پس‌زمینه ‌ی ماجراهای داستان «جهالت»، نوستالژی درد ناآگاهی است؛ آن‌چه «ایرنا» و «یوزف» را در دوران مهاجرت آزار می‌داد «نوستالژی» بوده: «دانستن اینکه از آن‌چه دور از آن‌هاست، بی‌خبر هستند»؛ «کوندرا» در این داستان، گذری به داستان «ادیسه» می‌زند، حماسه‌ ای که بنیان‌گذار نوستالژی شد، و زایش فرهنگ باستانی «یونان»، با آن داستان آغاز گردید؛ «اولیس» بزرگ‌ترین ماجراجوی تمام دوران، به جنگ «تروا» رفت، و ده سال جنگید، و سپس شتافت تا به سرزمین مادری‌ خویش «ایتاکا» برگردد؛ اما دسیسه‌ ی خدایان، سفرش را طولانی کرد؛ سه سال نخست سفر، پر از ماجراهای ناباورانه و شگفت انگیز بود، و سپس، به عنوان گروگان، در کنار پری‌ ای به نام «کالیپسو» سر کرد، «کالیپسو» چنان عاشق و گرفتار «اولیس» شده بود، که نمی‌گذاشت «اولیس» او را ترک کند؛ در طول بیست سال غیبت «اولیس»، اهالی «ایتاکا (زادگاهش)»، یادمانهای بسیاری از او در یاد نگاه داشته بودند، اما هرگزی دل‌تنگش نمی‌شدند و ...؛

نقل از متن: «کوچ پرندگان را دیده‌ ام، و شنیده‌ ام؛ آن‌ها می‌‌روند به دیاری دیگر، برای یافتن آب و دانه، و در این میان باز می‌گردند به سرزمین‌شان...»؛ پایان نقل

تاریخ بهنگام رسانی 13/08/1399هجری خورشیدی؛ ا. شربیانی ...more

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Jun 03, 2013 Nataliya rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Kris

Shelves: 2013-reads, location-is-the-true-protagonist

Milan Kundera's writing just seems to strike a right note with me, ever since the first time I read his works on a public commute as a wide-eyed college sophomore, getting hooked on the philosophical ramblings that are so essential to college years.

And that fascination apparently has withstood the test of time for me - maybe because deep down inside me a college philosopher still survives.

"Both of them are pidgeonholed, labeled, and they will be judged by how true they are to their labels (of

And that fascination apparently has withstood the test of time for me - maybe because deep down inside me a college philosopher still survives.

"Both of them are pidgeonholed, labeled, and they will be judged by how true they are to their labels (of course, that and that alone is what's emphatically called "being true to oneself")."

There's something about his books that makes them feel like narrative sketches, filled with author's musings in long, heavily punctuated sentences; ruminations about particular world experiences that finally, tangentially connect to the characters - and the characters themselves serving as just a canvas for Kundera's introspective reflections.

As with other Kundera's books that I've read, the background is, of course, Czech Republic, the Prague Spring of 1968 and the events it sprang in motion. The surface of the plot in Ignorance is a story of two émigrés, Irena and Josef, who have chosen to leave Czechoslovakia after the infamous end of the Prague Spring, and who have returned to visit their motherland 20 years later, after the regime that had driven them out collapsed.

"They had really done a lot for me. They saw me as the embodiment of an émigré's suffering. Then the time came for me to confirm that suffering by my joyous return to the homeland. And that confirmation didn't happen. They felt duped. And so did 'i, because up till then I'd thought they loved me not for my suffering but for my self."

And it does not come as a surprise to either one of them that they do not fit the mold of an émigré as the world labels such as them; that the land they left behind has irrevocably ceased being their home; that new lives have been started elsewhere and there is no easy way of shrugging those new memories in order to fit back into the mold from which they have sprang decades ago.

"She had always taken it as a given that emigrating was a misfortune. But, now she wonders, wasn't it instead an illusion of misfortune, an illusion suggested by the way people perceive an émigré?"

The motif Kundera relies on is the story of Odysseus, of his single-minded journey back to where he was from, to Ithaca, to his old life, where he - supposedly - belonged, where he was one of them, where his life outside of the boundaries of the island was little but an interruption in the regular chain of events. But what about the two decades of his life he spent elsewhere? Do they matter? And how is he supposed to reconcile them with the life to which he made his "great return"?

"For twenty years he [Odysseus] had thought about nothing but his return. But once he was back, he was amazed to realize that his life, the very essence of his life, its center, its treasure, lay outside Ithaca, in the twenty years of his wanderings. And this treasure he had lost, and could retrieve only by talking about it. [...] But in Ithaca he was not a stranger, he was one of their own, so it never occurred to anyone to say, "Tell us!"

To both Irena and Josef it seems that their lives outside of their - now former - home do not really matter to those whom they once left behind. And they cannot reconcile the memories of the old and the memories of the new; they cannot reconcile who they have become and who people think they should be; the past and the present.

And, an émigré myself - by choice and happily, unlike Irena and Josef - I can feel their unease and uncertainties resonating within me; having visited the place I'm from after living abroad for many years and realizing that past has moved on and that new home has been made, in another country, with me changed by the new place that I have adopted as much as it has adopted me, with me never again able to return to being who I was before leaving the homeland - because new memories have been made and internalized, and home has moved with me.

"It was a very strange conversation: I'd forgotten who they had been; they weren't interested in who I'd become. Can you believe that not one person here has ever asked me a single question about my life abroad? Not one single question! Never! I keep having the sense that they want to amputate twenty years of my life from me. Really, it does feel like an amputation. I feel shortened, diminished, like a dwarf."

Why does this happen? Tricks of memory, perhaps? The fickleness and selectiveness and shortsightedness of it; an ally on which we cannot truly rely. Memory is what we are so tempted to think we share with the others - but maybe it's just the illusion, like most other things in our lives. Because memory is what we make it, infusing it with meanings and significances that reflect more on ourselves than what actually happened.

"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 comparable: one person remembers the other more than he is remembered; first because memory capacity varies among individuals (an explanation that each of them would at least find acceptable), but also (and this is more painful to admit) because they don't hold the same importance for each other."

Kundera's writing still has the magic in its wistful philosophizing, exploration of nostalgia and memory, and I highly recommend this book. It leaves behind a vague feeling of dissatisfaction - not the irritated one of something not living up to the expectations, but the disappointment and dissatisfaction in the very expectations you hold, and somehow I find this feeling resonating and captivating. 4.5 stars. ...more

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Jul 31, 2019 Steven Godin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: france, czech-republic-poland, fiction

After being somewhat disappointed recently with Identity, Ignorance marked a return to form for Kundera, and although this was a really good effort, at this point of his career I still think he was past his peak brilliance. There is no doubt when he got it right, his gift of mingling politics, love, sex, history, and an exploration of subjectivity, really hits the spot, delivering a unique and captivating reading experience. Ignorance sees Kundera tackling a humanly richer theme than in Identity
After being somewhat disappointed recently with Identity, Ignorance marked a return to form for Kundera, and although this was a really good effort, at this point of his career I still think he was past his peak brilliance. There is no doubt when he got it right, his gift of mingling politics, love, sex, history, and an exploration of subjectivity, really hits the spot, delivering a unique and captivating reading experience. Ignorance sees Kundera tackling a humanly richer theme than in Identity, and I felt closer to his characters as a result of that. It is written with a nostalgia for ones homeland, and in irony tells of the Odyssean homecoming, but its deeper concerns lie with memory and forgetting. The set up is quite straightforward - Two exiles and widows, Irena and Josef, settled in Paris and Copenhagen respectively, take a trip back to post-Communist Prague to rediscover their old lives, but it is far from being easy as twenty years of political isolation and emotional absence mean no one really counts them among the living anymore. Not even family.

At Paris airport the pair meet by chance, and shared a brief encounter in Prague many years before, but only she remembers having met him. He has no idea who she is. Kundera homes in on with meticulous skill the alienation of the returning émigré. Trying on a dress, Irena is momentarily imprisoned in the life she might have led had she stayed, and believes any sort of future can only exist in France. For Josef, seeing his old watch on his brother's wrist threw him into a strange unease, and he attempts going though an old teenage diary but the obscure memory of his first love seems to punishes him. Both struggle to pick up the past or even claim a future. And it's this alienation that inexorably brings Irena and Josef together in the end. But their attraction is based on an unjust inequality, and in a regrettable manner is exposed as a delusion in an inevitable sex scene towards it's climax.

This Kundera book, more so than the others I have read, carried with it a deeper sadness and trauma. It was less fun to read, but still resonated like a loud siren with what it had to say. And although it can be looked at as a novel, we have to remember this is Kundera we're talking about, so it is, but then again it isn't. Ignorance could also be seen as an essay on the theme of homecoming and the idea of return. ...more

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Apr 06, 2018 Mutasim Billah rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: france, czech

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”

Ignorance is Kundera's tribute to the émigré. The story revolves around a woman called Irena, a Czech expatriate living in France, and her return to her homeland. On returning she meets Josef, a fellow émigré whom she knew from the past as a lover.

The novel examines the feelings of returning to an unfamiliar homeland after a long time, drawing parallels with ...more

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Sep 27, 2018 Elyse Walters rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I lost my review- no idea how while copying it from my notes it could completely vanish. No backup - nothin!!
I won’t even consider writing another one. Or typing out the excerpt I wanted to include. ( again)...
I’m too mad!

So...a couple of quick tip of the tongue thoughts:
The reading is more cerebral than experiential.

Thoughts about memory - forgetting- illusion & nostalgia are running themes ...
There is sadness in coming home... returning home after twenty years away.
We follow two lovers wh ...more

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Mar 21, 2012 Becky rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 1001-list-books

Someone needs to give Milan Kundera a chill pill. He's that dark brooding guy that sits at the back of a cafe staring moodily into his black coffee, the boyfriend you try for months to make love you but who at critical moments, suddenly declared it's all too base and animal, and you know, what is love anyway? Just a social construct. Etc etc. Sometimes Ignorance reads beautifully. I particularly enjoyed a lot of the musings on language and derivation of words, and their deviations between cultur ...more

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Feb 18, 2015 Seemita rated it really liked it · review of another edition

"The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it."

In this poignant recount of two people, forced to bid goodbye to their native country, in the diminished, yet flickering hope of finding a brighter tomorrow in an alien land, almost 20 years ago from the present, unravels a story replete with more questions than answers. Irena and Josef have found comfortable refuge in their respective abodes at Paris and Copenhagen and have led a fairly decent life, battling through tags of émigrés and periods of insuperable doubts. Irena has outlived her husband, Martin, reared her two daughters dutifully and seems comfortably living her life with her partner, Gustaf , many years her senior. Josef, after leading a few years of blissful matrimony with his Danish wife, had to surrender her to death which clutched the hands of a severe disease to bring down the curtains.

While it is not clear whether it was the insistence of Irena’s friend and the last request of Josef’s dying wife or the unbearable curse of her life’s banality and the inescapable ache of his loneliness that triggered the home coming, but when both took their flights to Prague, they were like two light, aimless clouds, who felt justified in being swayed adrift, since their hearts were a flutter of what they wished it to be and any likelihood of bathing in a sunnier sky was worthwhile the suspension in thin air.

But upon their arrivals, they get arrested in stifled laughs, hushed accusations, hesitant embraces and above all, a terrible wave of intermittent nostalgia.

Josef reads from the diary of a teen Josef, which he accidentally finds in the discarded little box handed over to him at his brother’s place, about his young love interest - "The desire to feel compassion for her and the desire to make her suffer are one and the same desire.”

He walks the city to spot novel changes which prick his eyes with their shiny bodies and he eloquently feels that

“during his absence, an invisible broom had swept across the landscape of his childhood, wiping away everything familiar; the encounter he had expected never took place.”

Irena, on her part, falls into the very trap she had tried so valiantly to flee twenty years ago; her garrulous mother’s circle of influence. She thinks she can escape her tyranny by escaping the brick house but the roads too seem mercilessly hostile. She wears a local dress, she finds in a city shop, to look (and feel) one of them but when she looks herself in the mirror, the dress itself seemed to have disowned her, accusing her of a traitor who could not live through the pain of this country; a coward who did not have the courage to bear her individual struggle in the interest of her nation.

Both Irena and Josef keep trudging into a world they felt was theirs all along but upon touching which emptied into the deepest throes of their comprehension, from where they could not retrieve it, despite determined measures. The familiar images seem breathing behind a veil of forgotten identity, rendering the entire image a nebulous element. Their families, friends and well-wishers were like distant dreams which look beautiful to think of and can be an aid of comfort for passing time but hold no consequence if chased.

The story culminates with Irena and Josef bumping into each other, which suddenly looks like the only worthwhile event of their home coming, for its in this chance meeting, that they find redemption of their individualities, their choices and their fates.

Kundera handles the nuances of human mind with an expert eye, which catches every skipped beat, which arrests every fleeting thought. Living in prolonged pain turns it a friend. Then the only image vitality conjures is that of an adversary.

The ideas of forgotten and nostalgia find utter beauty in his nuanced hands. Recreating Odyssey and drawing startling parallels between the protagonists was a class piece of emotional legerdemain. And his laced language had a subtle undertone of poetry which was marvelous to encounter at various bends of this book. I will sign off with this beautiful metaphorical gift:

“She makes love wildly, lasciviously, and at the same time the curtain of oblivion wraps her lewdnesses in an all-concealing darkness. As if a poet were writing his greatest poem with ink that instantly disappears.”

...more

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Jun 27, 2012 Megan Baxter rated it liked it · review of another edition

I really don't think Milan Kundera is an author for me. His characters are all so petty and cruel, so atomized and self-centered. I can deal with pettiness and cruelty being a theme of the book - but everyone? All the time?

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook ...more

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Mar 10, 2016 Rachelle Ghanem rated it really liked it · review of another edition

So many feelings , so many topics , very few pages...a very interesting novel

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Feb 23, 2011 Mike rated it really liked it · review of another edition

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 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 excellent if brief meditation on Kundera’s classic themes—love, relationships, memory, history, politics, etc. Kundera reminds me of Yeats in the way he mixes the personal and the public/political. It’s amazing that he is able to educate the reader enough on 20th Century Czech history during the novel(s) to join him as he points out the truly fascinating things going on throughout it. The connections Kundera consistently makes between large-scale political actions affecting an entire nation of people and subtle, private moments between two lovers are nothing short of brilliant.

Ignorance is about coming back, or the impossibility of coming back, or no… how coming back is complicated. It’s about how some things change, and other things stay the same, and neither is what you would have predicted. Two Czech emigrants return to Prague after the fall of Communism, and their complex relationships with their home and with each other are not simplified but further entangled. After years of questions about themselves, their friends, and their country, their Grand Returns defy expectations and leave them with more, and more challenging, questions.

Perhaps what is most enjoyable about Kundera is his conversationalist tone, as if he’s sitting in the room with you just sharing his observations and ideas over a drink. He does not simply present a scene and leave you to interpret and analyze it as you will, but instead is quite eager to tell you why he finds it so fascinating (and in a pretty straightforward and affable manner). I’ve never disagreed with him. I really ought to own at least one of his books so that I can underline and note various sentences and paragraphs—not only are they profound and moving in their often bittersweet simplicity now, but I suspect I will have a wonderful time rereading at least one of his books in the future when I find myself in a completely different stage of my life. Then again, maybe it’s appropriate that I’m not highlighting and annotating in the margins, because when I reread Kundera in the future, the text will be the same, but I won’t be, and all the scribbles and circles and stars I may trace next to and around the ink on the page won’t allow me to completely recapture then what I’m experiencing with the text now. How bittersweet. How Kundera. ...more

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Nov 13, 2019 Paula rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

#novellasinnovember

“He was waiting for just one thing: for them to finally say “Tell us!” And that is the one thing they never said. For 20 years he had thought about nothing but his return. But once he was back, he was amazed to realize that his life, the very essence of his life, its center, its treasure, lay outside Ithaca, in the 20 years of his wanderings. And this treasure he had lost and could retrieve only by telling about it.”

Faz este mês 30 anos que se deu a Revolução de Veludo, na ex- ...more

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Apr 13, 2020 Slow Reader rated it really liked it · review of another edition

My first Kundera after hearing about him for years from family members. I read this one in about 3 days (?) which is very fast for me. As my partner likes to say, he has an incredible "sensibilité humaine". Through Irena and Josef I now have a better understanding of what it's like being an eastern bloc émigré, because the ones i know personally (my mother's side of the family) have a hard time communicating or even comprehending the tangle of emotions that Kundera so elegantly reproduces in thi ...more

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Sep 12, 2015 Lee Foust rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I wrote about this for our English-language newspaper, Florence News and Events, here in Florence, Italy. I will post the article/review as soon as it's run in the paper. Pretty good novel, a great read for an immigrant like myself, even though it's somewhat weaker than Kundera's great novels. 3.5 stars really.

Far Away from Home—Nostalgia and Nostalghia

Milan Kundera’s begins the second chapter of his most recently translated novel, Ignorance (2002), with an etymological exploration of the word “ ...more

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Dec 14, 2020 Sidharth Vardhan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 4-europe, jerusalem-prize

"He had the sense he was coming back into the world as might a dead man emerging from his tomb after twenty years: touching the ground with a timid foot that's lost the habit of walking; barely recognizing the world he had lived in but continually stumbling over the leavings from his life; seeing his trousers, his tie on the bodies of the survivors, who had quite naturally divided them up among themselves; seeing everything and laying claim to nothing: the dead are timid." ...more

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Apr 18, 2012 Megan rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed

3.5 stars

Ignorance is a modern retelling of The Odyssey, focusing on two emigrants who were forced from their native Czech Republic during the reign of Communism in 1968. Irena flees to Paris with her husband Martin while Josef ends up settling in Denmark. Irena and Josef had met and flirted in a Czech bar briefly years before in their twenties, and they meet by chance again in their homeland after the dust has settled from the collapse of Communism in 1989. While their memories of that first en 3.5 stars

Ignorance is a modern retelling of The Odyssey, focusing on two emigrants who were forced from their native Czech Republic during the reign of Communism in 1968. Irena flees to Paris with her husband Martin while Josef ends up settling in Denmark. Irena and Josef had met and flirted in a Czech bar briefly years before in their twenties, and they meet by chance again in their homeland after the dust has settled from the collapse of Communism in 1989. While their memories of that first encounter at the bar differ greatly, they both feel like Odysseus returning to his homeland of Ithaca, with everything different but somehow the same. They each have to come to terms with being emigrants back in a place that no longer feels like home, with friends and family who can't (or won't even try) to understand what they're going through. Through all of this confusion and haziness, memories fade, twist, and are lost. Kundera explores the minds and memories of Irena and Josef as well as human beings as a collective, showing how we each form memories (sometimes as we wish things would have happened or more optimistically or pessimistically, depending on the situation when the memory occurred) and how we forget (sometimes ignorantly, sometimes on purpose).

I had no idea this was more of a philosophical book going into it. I only knew of Kundera from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which has been on my to-read list forever since it's on the BBC book challenge list and a lot of lists of books to read before you die. I think everyone's probably had a relationship that didn't end how you would've liked and that you sometimes replay over in your mind, trying to figure out how it could've gone better and what your life would've been like if you'd had the foresight to fix it while you had the chance. That's what attracted me to this book and it was really a fascinating and illuminating work on that subject. Everyone remembers things differently and there's no guarantee that you're going to make a big enough impact on someone's life for them to remember you for as long as you remember them. While that's kind of depressing, it's also true, and Kundera writes about these abstract ideas like time, memory, home, and absence beautifully. There were several quotes that really resonated with me (Kundera's writing is very profound and inspires lots of "aha" moments) but here are a few I could find:

“The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to 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 film.”

“The feeling, the irrepressible yearning to return, suddenly reveals to her the existence of the past, the power of the past, of her past; in the house of her life there are windows now, windows opening to the rear, onto what she has experienced; from now on her existence will be inconceivable without these windows.”

Although there were some parts where either the translation got a little confusing or it was just getting a little too philosophical for me, I really enjoyed this book and look forward to reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being soon. You might want to google "Prague Spring" before reading it if you're not familiar with it (as I was not and got a bit lost at times - history was never my strong suit) just so you have a better grasp of the setting and what the main characters are going through. This one probably needs a re-reading sometime in the future so I can better enjoy it and savor Kundera's messages (and probably give it one more star). ...more

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Jan 01, 2011 Yasmeen rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommended to Yasmeen by: my sister.

Shelves: fiction, 52-books-2011, literature

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

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Apr 05, 2009 Jim rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: anyone, esp. Eastern Europeans

I am an Eastern European myself and I felt the truth of Kundera's observations on the sad lives of exiles. One neither belongs to the old country any more, nor to the new one. I've read half a dozen of Kundera's books and am convinced he's one of the best novelists writing today. ...more

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Apr 14, 2017 Marija Andreeva rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: favorite-authors, melancholic, philosophy

I love Kundera, I love the way he writes. Every time I read something written him, I get lost in the story that he tells. He is a magician with words.

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Aug 07, 2017 Derek rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: favourites, literary-fiction, read-in-2017

The thing about Milan Kundera is the depth of his works. His characters are quite ordinary folks, but the way Milan writes them is a thing of beauty. Their class struggles, their struggles with identity and romance and neglect is amazing and relatable. He's not a master of style or anything like that, but though simple, his words carry such depth. However complex the thought behind the writing, it always comes out beautiful. And this is a literary masterpiece. Never has a study in reminiscence b ...more

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Sep 19, 2012 Ema rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2012, light-philosophy, czech

A friend advised me to read other novels by Kundera before diving into The unbearable lightness..., his most famous writing, so that I could appreciate his other works, too. I wonder if that is the case, as I sense that I'll become one of his fans pretty soon.

This is the second book by Kundera and I enjoyed it quite a lot. There's something different about his writing style (I can't put my finger on it), but I can tell I love it! He has the gift to turn simple, mundane situations into an entire ...more

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Feb 17, 2013 Michael Vagnetti rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

A fictional calculus of "nostalgia": who you are, where you are from, where you are going, what you remember. The writing begins with a foundation of multi-lingual etymology and classical history, and then its characters are put to the task, often under harsh light, of dramatizing the word. They define it through an intimate choreography. This is a beautiful, parsimonious, and complex technique.

What matters is kept in obvious relief: emotions, words, and decisions. Although not everyone is an e ...more

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Feb 13, 2018 Claire rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: precinct-81, 1001-books-to-read-before-you-die

A beautiful book about nostalgia. Milan Kundera is a delicious writer, describing human feelings in such a delicate way that we can’t but feel for the characters.
Nostalgia and a lot of uncomfortable questions slowly creep into your head, leaving you wondering for a long time. Feeling sad for human condition, but also comforted because you recognise so much.The novel does what the best books should accomplish, enriching you as a human.

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Sep 05, 2018 Sevelina Todorova rated it really liked it · review of another edition

The immigrant as the ultimate foreigner (even in his home country). Surprisingly good book.

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Dec 09, 2009 Brian rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: culture-and-politics, fiction

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 have to be an emegree to enjoy th 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 have to be an emegree to enjoy this book.

The book, like all of Kundera's that I have read, touch on the deepest parts of human psyche...he uses the backdrop of this dramatic return to show the fragility of memory, along with the great buildups of nostalgia that accompany these fragile memories. He weaves these ideas with an over-arching capacity for self-interest which he feels humans can can not get past.

The use of the return to bring all these human feelings to the forefront was, as Kundera hoped, very homer-esque. One of the better peices of the book goes like this:

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 dont 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 dont intersect; and even in terms of quantity they are not comparable: one person remembers the other more then he is remembered; first because memory capacity varies among individuals (an explanation that each of them would find acceptable, but also (and this is more painful to admit) because they don't hold the same importance for each other.

And Milan is not strictly an anti-communist, he does not think in black and white (as is obvious to anyone who has ever read "On laughter and forgetting") despite the wests attempts to brand him as such, and despite his own need to get away from soviet communism. One of the more interesting interactions in the book is between one of the emigres and a communist. Not just a party convert, but an actual communist of conviction who was a communist before it would have been benefit to his career to be so. This character was written as the most sane character in the book, with a litter of well off kids and grand kids, and an air of wisdom with which he brushed aside the pains of the past during discussion.

Anyways...the book was somewhere near awesome...not quite great, definitly good+ and it was an EXTREMELY QUICK READ.

One thought I had, while trying to wrap my mind around the Oddesy thing was the (already allueded to) end of this possibility for disconnect created by the net, which would seem to make these types of encounters a thing of the past (for right now at least).... ...more

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Oct 31, 2018 James Henderson rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: mitteleuropa

When Odysseus returned to Ithaka after twenty years of travel and travail he was welcomed home; but was his return to the place he remembered and to the wife that he remembered? With Ignorance Milan Kundera gives the reader a meditation on this theme and others. Ignorance raises the question of where home is anymore in the modern world, not only for émigrés but for anyone who moves around. The place of one’s birth no longer seems to qualify, as one grows away from it, moves to more attractive pl When Odysseus returned to Ithaka after twenty years of travel and travail he was welcomed home; but was his return to the place he remembered and to the wife that he remembered? With Ignorance Milan Kundera gives the reader a meditation on this theme and others. Ignorance raises the question of where home is anymore in the modern world, not only for émigrés but for anyone who moves around. The place of one’s birth no longer seems to qualify, as one grows away from it, moves to more attractive places, or becomes cosmopolitan in tastes. For people in and from formerly communist countries, sudden opportunities to travel and migrate, after decades of restricted opportunities, seem to have raised the question afresh.

Irena, the novel’s main character, who lives in Paris, has enjoyed the status of émigré for two decades: Parisians feel sorry for the poor Czech woman and after the fall of Czech communism in 1989, they begin to wonder why she is not hurrying back home to help out. Her Parisian friends seem to consider it her patriotic duty. Yet Irena has worked hard to become settled in Paris, where she buried her Czech husband and raised their two daughters, who for all practical matters are French. Now Irena has a job, an apartment, and a boyfriend in Paris, not a bad city in which to make one’s home. Only a visit from her mother, who still lives in Prague, persuades Irena to make a return visit to the city of her birth.

Josef, the novel’s other main character, likewise fled Czechoslovakia in 1969. He settled in Denmark, where he married a Danish woman, and they lived happily together until she died. Josef, still mourning her death and attached to their home in Denmark, where he keeps everything just as it was when she was alive, is also very slow to return to the land of his birth. Now he is returning for a visit only because he had promised his dying wife that he would.

On their way to Czechoslovakia, Irena and Josef meet by chance in the Paris airport. Irena remembers Josef from another chance encounter many years before in Prague, before she married. There had been some chemistry between the two, but after their meeting they had never seen each other again: “Their love story stopped before it could start.” Now Irena introduces herself again, and they agree to get together in Prague. Actually, Josef cannot remember her, but now he sees no reason to turn down an opportunity for friendship with a warm, good-looking woman.

Before they rendezvous in Prague, they both have certain rounds to make and this is where Kundera begins to raise doubts about the idea of the Great Return. Both Irena and Josef are struck by the strangeness of the spoken Czech language, which seems to have developed an ugly nasal drawl since their departure. They also both notice the hometown diminution effect: Landscapes and city scenes that once seemed impressive have shrunk into insignificance, if they have not disappeared altogether. Worst of all, the whole country has been inundated by tasteless popular culture and crass commercialism; for example, the music on the radio is described as “noise” and “sewage-water music,” and the tubercular face of writer Franz Kafka adorns a T-shirt for tourists.

Both Irena and Josef get a glimpse of what they might have become if they had stayed in Czechoslovakia. When the weather turns hot, Irena buys a dowdy Czech dress that makes her look “naïve, provincial, inelegant” and “pitiable, poor, weak, downtrodden.” In his high school diary that his brother had saved for him, Josef is able to contemplate the “little snot” he used to be, back in the days of his virginity, when he obsessed about girls but could express his feelings only by torturing his girlfriends emotionally. Both Irena and Josef also get an eyeful of their potential selves in the friends and relatives that they meet, who form a kind of gauntlet for the two visitors but who otherwise have not missed them for twenty years.

Irena tries to socialize with some Prague friends, but after an awkward moment, her friends declare their “plain-and-simple” preference for beer rather than the wine she offers them. Then, beer in hand, they stand around chatting to each other about local matters, pretty much ignoring Irena. They are totally uninterested in what she has been doing during the twenty years she was away. Irena realizes that they have “amputated twenty years from her life” and no longer have much in common with her. She already misses her Parisian friend Sylvie.

In the provincial hometown that he visits, Josef has to run an even worse gauntlet formed by his sister-in-law, his Czech former wife (to whom he was married for only a few months), and his stepdaughter. Josef’s brother is happy enough to see him again, though the brother is somewhat embarrassed because he has taken over the family home and Josef’s old belongings. Although she also enjoys his goods, Josef’s sister-in-law has not forgiven him for running off and causing them to suffer under the Communist regime. Worse, she calls up his former wife and tells her he is in town. Then his stepdaughter calls him to say she has to see him right away to discuss certain important matters that she cannot talk about on the phone, but when he calls back to break their appointment, the stepdaughter says her mother warned her about what “a filthy little egotist” he is.

By the time Irena and Josef meet in Prague, they are ready for some relief and consolation. They share each other’s stories over lunch and wine, then head up to his hotel room. Before long, they are making love, but it does not end well and he leaves to catch his plane back to Denmark.

Thus, the ending of the novel is immensely sad. For both Irena and Josef, the Great Return to their homeland fizzles out and so does their brief romance. Even though Josef realizes that Irena is in love with him, he is still emotionally committed to his dead wife. Irena and Josef have crossed paths again, but again their paths do not match. Another possibility, however, is that Irena will find the encounter with Josef liberating. Until this encounter, Irena has tended to be dependent in her relationships with other people—first with her mother, then with her husband, Martin, and even with her married boyfriend, Gustaf.

Throughout the novel, Kundera also draws parallels to and meditates on the ur-myth of the Great Return—the story of Homer’s Odyssey (c. 725 b.c.e.), which is at the center of Ignorance just as the story of Oedipus’s sense of moral responsibility is at the center of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Here Kundera seems to draw on the myth of Odysseus’s return primarily to show that it no longer applies to the modern world but is a romantic hangover from another time. For Odysseus, the return had tremendous validity, as he struggled to get back to his beloved homeland and wife. Around the time of the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who wrote a stirring poem about Odysseus’s restlessness after his return, the myth started going downhill. Now the myth seems totally meaningless.

Where is home anymore? Where is love? In Ignorance Kundera seems to say that in the modern world neither of these is easy to find. Kundera destroys the idea that the place of one’s birth has any special significance. Instead, life is full of possibilities. Home and love are out there somewhere, but they have to be compatible with one’s identity, which in the modern world is a shifting, developing concept, dependent not just on one’s origins but on one’s experiences, memories, ideals, and ignorance.
...more

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Mar 24, 2013 Suad Shamma rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013, own

This was my first Milan Kundera book and I was very pleased with my selection. Quite a straightforward and easy to read book, Ignorance is a novel that delves into the lives of refugees. Two, to be exact.

How their lives have changed when they left their country, in this case the Czech Republic during the Russian invasion, and moved to neighbouring countries to make a new life for themselves. What it feels like to go back to their country of origin after so many years, how the memories they had o ...more

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Apr 24, 2012 Akvile rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: well-written

Being an Eastern European and living in UK I can relate a lot to the story and the main characters, even if I belong to a different generation and my circumstances of leaving the country I was born were completely different.

Although I like Milan Kundera as an author, I read this book for my book club meeting. It was very interesting to hear how the others related to the story or what they took from it because I realised that to certain extent it takes to be someone from 'Eastern block' to fully ...more

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Mar 04, 2008 Kristen rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: book-club

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Aug 05, 2017 Alex rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I almost donated this unread book to the library in Vancouver, but plucked it out of a box and realized that my past self had gifted me a novel perfectly applicable to my present, four years later. It has given me such solace through this return to my homeland. Though still in the same country, speaking the same language, my Great Return to Toronto shares the same unavoidable dredging up of the past (and past selves) as the protagonists' returns to Prague. As always, Kundera nails descriptions o ...more

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About Milan Kundera

Milan Kundera

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Milan Kundera is a Czech and French writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized French citizen in 1981. He is best known for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke.

Kundera has written in both Czech and French. He revises the French translations of all his books; these therefore are not considered tr ...more

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Quotes from الجهل

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.” — 1437 likes

“To die; to decide to die; that's much easier for an adolescent than for an adult. What? Doesn't death strip an adolescent of a far larger portion of future? Certainly it does, but for a young person, the future is a remote, abstract, unreal thing he doesn't really believe in.” — 97 likes

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