Ignorance
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The bestselling masterpiece tale of love and exile in Prague by the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
'An artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere.' Salman Rushdie
'A subtle, penetrating and deeply felt exploration of the sadness, loneliness and irreparable loss of exile: one of [Kundera's] best novels.' Sunday Times
Irena has been exiled to Paris since leaving Czechoslovakia after the crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968. Twenty years later, after the collapse of Communism, she returns to her homeland - and reunites, by chance, with Josef, a fellow émigré and her one-time lover. Will they pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted in their native land almost as soon as it began - now lost in the tides of history, far from home? Or do their memories no longer align?
A profound, polyphonic meditation on absence and alienation, nostalgia and truth, Ignorance is a masterpiece exposing the reality behind the romance of the homeward voyage.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Would an Odyssey even be conceivable today? Is the epic of return pertinent to our own time? When Odysseus woke on Ithaca's shore that morning, could he have listened in ecstasy to the music of the Great Return if the old olive trees had been felled and he recognized nothing around him?" Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) continues to perfect his amalgam of Nietzschean aphorism and erotic tale-telling in this story of disappointing homecomings. The time is 1989 and the Communists have fallen in Prague. In the Paris airport, Irena, a Czech migr , recognizes an ex-compatriot, Josef. More than 20 years ago, Josef almost seduced Irena in a Prague bar; the two chat and agree to meet again in Prague. Each is returning for a different reason. Irena, in 1968, fled the country with Martin, her husband, to escape the political pressure he was under. Martin is long dead, their children are grown and Irena is now being pressured to return to Prague by her Swedish lover, Gustaf, who has set up an office in the city. Josef, a veterinarian, also left the country after the Russian invasion, out of disgust. He is returning to the Czech Republic to fulfill a request from his recently deceased wife. Both discover new and annoying aspects of Prague (such as Kafka T-shirts) as well as old bitterness. When they meet, Josef neglects to tell Irena one fact: he doesn't really remember her. With elegant detachment and measured passion, Kundera once again shows himself the master of both the erudite and the carnal in this Mozartian interlude.
