Mention Books Supposing Ignorance
| Original Title: | L'ignorance |
| ISBN: | 0060002107 (ISBN13: 9780060002107) |
| Edition Language: | French |
| Characters: | Josef, Irena |
| Setting: | Prague (Praha)(Czech Republic) |
| Literary Awards: | Scott Moncrieff Prize for Linda Asher (2003) |
Be Specific About Appertaining To Books Ignorance
| Title | : | Ignorance |
| Author | : | Milan Kundera |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Anniversary Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 195 pages |
| Published | : | September 30th 2003 by Harper Perennial (first published April 2000) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. European Literature. Czech Literature. Novels. Literature |
Description As Books Ignorance
A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier when they had chosen 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. Then again, what can we expect of our weak memory? It records only "an insignificant, minuscule particle" of the past, "and no one knows why it's this bit and not any other bit." We live our lives sunk in a vast forgetting, a fact we refuse to recognize. Only those who return after twenty years, like Odysseus returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance firsthand.
Milan Kundera is the only author today who can take such dizzying concepts as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transform them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work.
Author Biography: The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, for more than twenty years.
He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, The Farewell Party, The Books of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves, all originally written in Czech.
Like Slowness, his two earlier nonfiction works, The Art ofthe Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.
Rating Appertaining To Books Ignorance
Ratings: 3.78 From 16570 Users | 1158 ReviewsCritique Appertaining To Books Ignorance
When Skacel locked himself into the house of sadness for three hundred years, it was because he expected his country to be engulfed forever by the empire of the East. He was wrong. Everyone is wrong about the future. Man can only be certain about the present moment. But is that quite true either? Can he really know the present? Is he in a position to make any judgment about it? Certainly not. For how can a person with no knowledge of the future understand the meaning of the present? If we do not"The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it." In this poignant recount of two people, forced to bid goodbye to their native country, in the diminished, yet flickering hope of finding a brighter tomorrow in an alien land, almost 20 years ago from the present, unravels a story replete with more questions than answers. Irena and Josef have found comfortable refuge in their respective abodes at Paris and Copenhagen and
57. L'ignorance = Ignorance, Milan KunderaCzech expatriate Irena, who has been living in France, decides to return to her home after twenty years. During the trip she meets, by chance, Josef, a fellow émigré who was briefly her lover in Prague. The novel examines the feelings instigated by the return to a homeland, which has ceased to be a home. In doing so, it reworks the Odyssean themes of homecoming. It paints a poignant picture of love and its manifestations, a recurring theme in Kundera's
Kundera is my favorite of the slew of authors made famous in the west due to their emigration from and outspoken cries against Soviet Communism. Many of the others (i.e. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) have been "made" great due to the wests need to hear these stories. Kundera just "is" good.An over arching concept of the book is the comparison of a modern day homecoming (post cold war, pre myspace) with that of Odysseus returning to Greece. However, don't feel like you have to be an emegree to enjoy
I wrote about this for our English-language newspaper, Florence News and Events, here in Florence, Italy. I will post the article/review as soon as it's run in the paper. Pretty good novel, a great read for an immigrant like myself, even though it's somewhat weaker than Kundera's great novels. 3.5 stars really.Far Away from HomeNostalgia and NostalghiaMilan Kunderas begins the second chapter of his most recently translated novel, Ignorance (2002), with an etymological exploration of the word
Someone needs to give Milan Kundera a chill pill. He's that dark brooding guy that sits at the back of a cafe staring moodily into his black coffee, the boyfriend you try for months to make love you but who at critical moments, suddenly declared it's all too base and animal, and you know, what is love anyway? Just a social construct. Etc etc. Sometimes Ignorance reads beautifully. I particularly enjoyed a lot of the musings on language and derivation of words, and their deviations between
I love Kundera, I love the way he writes. Every time I read something written him, I get lost in the story that he tells. He is a magician with words.
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