9780060002091

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A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier when they chose 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.

"[A] hodgepodge of romance, history, and philosophy....An honorable failure...."

Kirkus, 08/01/2002

"In this twilight novel, history is denied by Josef's turn from memory and Irena's quest for the future, but Milada, who did not leave Prague, invests IGNORANCE with its melancholy, moving conclusion."

Maureen Howard, New York Times Book Review, 10/06/2002

Ignorance: Search Results