Ignorance
"Kundera once more delivers a seductive, intelligent entertainment ... [with] elegance and grace." -- Washington Post Book World
"Nothing short of masterful." -- Newsweek
A brilliant novel set in contemporary Prague, by one of the most distinguished writers of our time.
A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned 20 years earlier when they chose to become exiles. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence "their memories no longer match." We always believe that our memories coincide with those of the person we loved, that we experienced the same thing. But this is just an illusion. Only those who return after 20 years, like Ulysses returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance first-hand.
Kundera is the only author today who can take dizzying concepts such as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transform them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work.
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The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1929 - 2023) was born in Brno and lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves--all originally in Czech. His later novels, Slowness, Identity, Ignorance, and The Festival of Insignificance, as well as his nonfiction works, The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed, The Curtain, and Encounter, were originally written in French.
"An entertaining and thought-provoking work"--Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
"Elegant ... the emotional and intellectual payoff is extraordinary."--Time Out New York
"Kundera once more delivers a seductive, intelligent entertainment ... [with] elegance and grace."--Washington Post Book World
"A tour de force."--Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Rendered with compassion and humor."--Library Journal
"Kundera is and elegant writer ... He does a masterful job of reminding that the political is the personal."--Rocky Mountain News
"Precise and spare ...page by page this novel is dazzling."--Montreal Gazette
"Moving ... There is a painful injustice and inequality to memory, which these encounters beautifully illustrate."--Boston Globe
"By far his most successful [novel] since THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING."--Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Nothing short of masterful."--Newsweek
"[A] beautifully written tale of desire and loss."--Newark Star Ledger
"Milan's Kundera's resonant new novel IGNORANCE ....[is] wonderfully nuanced .... affecting."--Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
"Erudite and playful...An impassioned account of the émigré as a character on the stage of European history."--Maureen Howard, New York Times Book Review
