Reading 1001 discussion

Read 2014
Plot: Story of emigre's who left their country and the experience memory and returning to the homeland. The author really presents an essay with a story and compares it to the Odyssey and the homecoming.
Thoughts/quotes:
I liked it better than The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I liked the essay part of the story on memory and emigrent experience. I think the message that Kundera gives with his bits on sexual encounters are very real. He doesn't make it more than what it is. I could do without the detail but I appreciate what he is saying.

3/5 stars for me too. Read in 2014.

Ignorance addresses the complexities of nostalgia, emigration, homeland and “the age of ignorance”. Irene and Josef are immigrants from the Czech Republic. Irene moves to France and Josef to Denmark. This story is about their recent trip back after some 20 years. “For the very notion of homeland, with all its emotional power, is bound up with the relative brevity of our life, which allows us too little time to become attached to some other county, to other countries, to other languages.” The first half of the book I enjoyed. Reading about our 2 characters and learning of their past lives in the Czechoslovakia but the second half of the book kind of fizzled for me.

read Oct. 2021

Either I missed a great deal or I wasn’t in the correct frame of mind for this novel. I can say it was ‘interesting’ (but not entirely in the positive sense). The best I can say is it is short. The characters are not people who live an examined life, instead they move through their lives in ignorance - of the basis of their own actions, of any real connection with their friends, and of happiness. All of the characters are unhappy. The only one that I could empathize with was Josef who did spend time reflecting on his past and how his emigration affected his family. 3*

A short book about the experience of being an immigrant, leaving one's country, one's language and one's family and friends to build a new life elsewhere and what the residual impact of never being "home" feels like. Kundera examines the nature of nostalgia and how what the immigrant yearns for is not his/her country so much as the past in which one belonged. This is completely out of reach even if one returns home. The characters struggle with memories that either have too much meaning or none at all, and the assumptions their friends have about wanting to join them in the here and now back in the old country. All of this is compared to Odysseus and his long journey to get home and how his life is defined by that journey. I enjoyed the thinking and reflection of the author, but didn't connect very much with his characters. I gave it 3 stars.

Pre-2016 review:

****

Irena lives in Paris with Gustaf, a Swedish man older than her, after having fled Czechoslovakia 20 years before with her first husband, Martin. Josef also fled Czechoslovakia, but for Denmark, where he met and married his wife, who is now dead, and he still hasn't gotten over her absence. Both Irena and Josef meet by chance at the airport in Paris while on their way to Prague, for the first time after the end of the communist regime. But they already have met more than 20 years before, at the start of an affair that did not happen. I won't be adding more here, as it would spoil the rest of the story. This is a story about nostalgia; the link with ignorance comes from the origins of the Spanish word used for nostalgia. It is vintage Kundera, master at blending the arts of the novel, the essay and poetry into one single flowing material. There are a few unexpected twists in this story, which help overcome the disappointment of his two prior French efforts (Slowness, Identity). Quite happy to have re-read this.