Ignorance

I haven't read anything by Milan Kundera for years.  I loved him when I was about seventeen and have read pretty much everything by him.  In my youth, studying the philosophy of morality I really connected with his work.  As a result, Ignorance is the only one of his books on The List that I have left to read.  And I remember now why I like him so much.

Ignorance tells the story of two people who abandoned their Czech homeland in the years of Communism.  Following its fall in 1989 they both come back for the first time in twenty years.  The pair, Irena and Josef, meet by chance in a Parisian airport and, each sort of remembering the other, decide to get together while in Prague.  The book is actually remarkably dense for something that is fewer than 200 pages long- as well as their respective visits home, Kundera details Irena and Josef's memories of other.

The story is pretty simple, for all that's packed in there and Kundera is even kind enough to provide a brief history of Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic (including why the number twenty is so important in the country's 20th Century history) for those of us who only have a vague concept of the Eastern Bloc and zero memories pre-1989.  Kundera then gors on to use said simple story as a way of exploring the concept of memory.  Irena's memories of her time with Josef are different to Josef's memories of his time with Irena.  This fact shapes their present day interactions.  It's difficult to explain without just giving the whole plot away or over-simplifying Kundera's points to an inane redundancy, but it's good. I enjoyed it.

Ironically, given my fond memories of Kundera, he also touches on the importance of nostalgia.  Nostalgia, Kundera tells us, comes from two Greek words- 'nostros' which means 'return' and 'algos'- 'suffering.'  Nostalgia is literally "suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return."  He ties this all into the idea of emigration and language- each of the European languages have subtle differences in their words for the same concept.  The etymology of these various languages means that Irena especially is left living in Paris with a feeling of longing that we are told cannot be expressed fully in French.  Again, it's such a complex idea and, after telling us off of this, Kundera weaves the idea of nostalgia into the rest of the story.  He uses it to explain why both Irena and Josef decided to return to the Czech Republic and why Josef finds it impossible to stay.

As I said, there's a lot in Ignorance.  It's one of the few books that I've enjoyed that made me wish I were better read.  There are frequent references to the Odyssey- again showing the significance of twenty years- that I know I don't grasp the nuances of.  It also makes me wish I were better travelled; having lived in just two places in my entire life, emigration and the feelings associated with it are a difficult concept.  Mostly, though, this book just made me nostalgic for my education.