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Loading... Ignorance: A Novelby Milan Kundera
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Translated into Persian, rank 57/1001  kousha | Oct 19, 2009 |  I felt the book had good material to work with, but that it didn't take off. There were a lot of questions raised, but it didn't delve into them too deeply. In terms of the plot, it was very basic. As an essay, this is an interesting piece; as a novel, I feel it could have done better. (  ) famehunter | Jul 30, 2009 | Kundera's Ignorance is less a love story and more a treaty on how our memories work; No two people who have lived through the same experiences will retain the same memories of the events. When a man and a woman return separately to their homeland after a forced absence of 20 years, they find that their memories of their lives, their homeland, and their friend's memories of them, cannot be reconciled. The separate storylines of the individuals overlap towards a heartbreakingly logical climax. This is one of Kundera's best works. (  ) quilted_kat | May 17, 2008 | I read "The Incredible Lightness of Being" in college and didn't much care for it, and I didn't much care for this one either. I feel like I ought to like Kundera more being the pretentious book snob that I am, but somehow I find him to be too callous. All of (both of) his books that I have read have felt bled of spirit - too cynical. I appreciate the outside perspective that he has - looking at any human thought or feeling or relationship from outside makes the thought or feeling or relationship look shallow and ultimately meaningless. Objectively this may be true, but I find it to be unsatisfactory. (  )1  zip_000 | Jan 31, 2008 | I enjoyed this a lot, but it was less satisfying than Kundera's longer books that address similar themes (memory, identity, happiness and the kitsch). It is a quicker, easier read, and makes perhaps a simpler point, than 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being' or 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', and may therefore be more attractive to readers that have struggled with Kundera before. It tells the story of two near strangers attempting to pick up a love affair decades after it had just failed to spark between them. However, their memories fail to match, and Kundera uses this to examine familiar territory: the role of memory in identity and the subjectivenss of happiness. It is a well constructed short(ish) tale that showcases Kundera's skill as a writer beautifully, but this wouldn't be my first choice out of his books. 2 depressaholic | Jan 7, 2008 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0060002093, Hardcover)Bypassing the question of whether you can ever go home again, Milan Kundera's Ignorance tackles instead what happens when you actually get there. Ignorance is the story of two Czechs who meet by chance while traveling back to their homeland after 20 years in exile. Irena, who fled the country in 1968 with her now-deceased husband Martin, returns to Prague only to find coldness and indifference on the part of her former friends. Josef, who emigrated after the Russian invasion, is back in Prague to fulfill a wish of his beloved late wife. As fate would have it, the two have met before in their former lives, and the before-skirted passionate encounter is now destined to transpire. However, as in the story of Odysseus, which this novel so deliberately parallels, every homecoming brings with it a conflicting set of emotions so powerful that one has to question whether the voyage is really worth the pain. Expertly tackling the philosophical and emotional themes of nostalgia, memory, love, loss, and endurance, Kundera continues to astound readers with his masterful ability to understand and articulate issues so central to the human condition. --Gisele Toueg(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:02 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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