Ignorance by Milan Kundera – #NovNov Day 21

For those keeping track, I didn’t blog yesterday but I DID finish a book. I didn’t write about it because it’s a future British Library Women Writers title and I’m not sure I’m meant to mention it here yet.

ANYWAY onto Day 21, and what I think is my seventh Kundera novel(la) – Ignorance, published in French in 2002 and translated by Linda Asher. I love Kundera’s writing and unique approach to the novel, especially when I’m in the right frame of mind to embrace his zig-zaggy, philosophical, quirky style.

The book opens with Irena speaking to her friend Sylvie. Irena’s long-term relationship with Gustaf (albeit as his mistress) has just ended, and she is being quizzed on why she is staying France. Sylvie moved from Prague years earlier, and now considers Paris her home – wiping out her Czech past, in many ways. This is the jumping off point for Kundera to think about the concept of nostalgia – how it is phrased in different languages, how we both remember and forget our pasts, what the idea of returning does to a person. Sylvie has a recurring dream that she is living again in Prague – but the dream is haunting, claustrophobic, and unwelcome.

These dream-nightmares seemed to her all the more mysterious in that she was afflicted simultaneously with an uncontrollable nostalgia and another, completely opposite, experience: landscapes from her country kept appearing to her by day. No, this was not daydreaming, lengthy and conscious, willed; it was something else entirely: visions of landscapes would blink on in her head unexpectedly, abruptly, swiftly, and go out instantly. She would be talking to her boss and all at once, like a flash of lightning, she’d see a path through a field. She would be jostled on the Metro and suddenly, a narrow lane in some leafy Prague neighborhood would rise
up before her for a split second. All day long these fleeting images would visit her to assuage the longing for her lost Bohemia.

The same moviemaker of the subconscious who, by day, was sending her bits of the home landscape as images of happiness, by night would set up terrifying returns to that same land. The day was lit with the beauty of the land forsaken, the night by the horror of returning to it. The day would show her the paradise she had lost; the night, the hell she had fled.

Ultimately, Sylvie does make a visit back to Prague. Along the way, the narrative passes like a baton among different people in the book – to Gustaf (which takes us to the past of their relationship), and particularly to Josef. Josef is a man from Sylvie’s past, whom she bumps into in Prague airport. Like her, he has been living abroad – in Denmark. He hasn’t been back for more than a decade, and both of them are being reintroduced to families, friends and places that seem both unchanged and, simultaneously, to have weathered an enormous amount of change. More or less everything I know about the Czech Republic’s history (under its various names) comes from other Kundera novels I’ve read – and it is woven in here too, with all the turmoil the country faced over the 20th century. And particularly the impact of Communism on its émigrés Sylvie and Josef.

Like most of Kundera’s novels, the plot is a simple thread through the centre of the book – but what makes the book so wonderful are the tangents, the reflections, the aleatory connections between fictional characters and moments in time. The two main elements that Kundera returns to are The Odyssey and the German composer Arnold Schoenberg. Sure, why not! My first Kundera novel was Immortality, which includes Goethe, Hemingway, Marx, Napoleon, Beethoven etc, so I was well prepared. Not as characters, you understand, but as sidenotes by the narrator – telling a story that only meets tangentially with the main plot, but those meetings illuminate the story and make it so much more.

Here, for instance, is a moment about The Odyssey that – without Kundera drawing the comparison overtly – tells us much more about Sylvie:

During the twenty years of Odysseus’ absence, the people of Ithaca retained many recollections of him but never felt nostalgia for him. Whereas Odysseus did suffer nostalgia, and remembered almost nothing.

We can comprehend this curious contradiction if we realize that for memory to function well, it needs constant practice: if recollections are not evoked again and again, in conversations with friends, they go. Emigres gathered together in compatriot colonies keep retelling to the point of nausea the same stories, which thereby become unforgettable. But people who do not spend time with their compatriots, like Irena or Odysseus, are inevitably stricken with amnesia. The stronger their nostalgia, the emptier of recollections it becomes. The more Odysseus languished, the more he forgot. For nostalgia does not heighten memory’s activity, it does not awaken recollections; it suffices unto itself, unto its own feelings, so fully absorbed is it by its suffering and nothing else.

My Novellas in November project is going so well. I keep writing very positive reviews, and they are genuinely effusive – so far, it has brought many brilliant books off my shelves. This is right up there with the best Kundera books I’ve read, and that makes it one of the best books I’ve read this year.

11 thoughts on “Ignorance by Milan Kundera – #NovNov Day 21

  • November 22, 2021 at 12:09 am
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    Your experience of novellas in November is the same as mine. Everything I’ve read has been great. I wonder why that is? Maybe because a novella has to be really good to break through the resistance to the pricing of a short read?

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    • November 22, 2021 at 12:10 am
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      Yes, that could be a good reason!

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  • November 22, 2021 at 3:15 am
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    You and Lisa should write an advertisement for the event for next year. Hehehe

    I’ve never read Kundera. I should, I know….

    And what a tease you are, dangling that unspoken book in front of us… :-)

    Reply
  • November 22, 2021 at 12:00 pm
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    Well done! I’m enjoying my novellas in November, too, although they are all slightly blurring. At least I’m doing non-fiction and fiction ones …

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    • November 24, 2021 at 2:29 pm
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      Ha! At the mo mine aren’t blurring, but previous experience suggests I might forget them more quickly than I do other books…

      Reply
  • November 22, 2021 at 2:43 pm
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    Used to be a great Kundera fan in my late teens but this is one I haven’t read. The concept of nostalgia and the question of whether we can ever really go home are two of my favourite topics, so I will definitely look for this one.

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    • November 24, 2021 at 2:18 pm
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      Is there anything that made you stop reading, or did it just drop off?

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  • November 22, 2021 at 6:52 pm
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    Maybe it’s time to reacquaint myself with Kundera, you make a good case!

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    • November 24, 2021 at 2:17 pm
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      Oh he is wonderful!

      Reply
  • June 19, 2023 at 11:28 am
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    U mention the characters name in the wrong way, in the several places u wrote Sylvie, in the Novel that is not Sylvie but Irena.

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    • June 19, 2023 at 6:29 pm
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      Thanks!

      Reply

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