Ignorance is Milan Kundera’s most recent novel. It is a modern play on the Odyssey (and hence another in my series of Homer inspired books this year).
We’re fond of thinking that a return to something that was lost is a beautiful and fulfilling experience, but Kundera shows how the return is actually empty, and that we can never recapture what we once had.
He reminds us that when Odysseus wakes up on the beach at Ithaca, he does not recognise his longed for homeland: everything is the same, but everything has changed. Or at least his memories of home, the force that has sustained him over his twenty years of absence, have proved to have been inaccurate, an idealised version of reality.
We can never return, because we cannot form an accurate and lasting picture of it, and nostalgia – literally ‘return home-pain’ – is indeed an affliction.
As usual, Kundera ranges over a bewildering array of material, with an economy and beauty that renders it at the same time approachable and complex. I may have given the impression that this is some kind of essay, and there’s always a suspicion of that with Kundera, but in fact his themes are woven into a beautiful and poignant story of two exiles seeking their own return, who are met with incomprehension when they are unable to find it.
The third of Kundera’s novels to be written in French (rather than in Czech), and bearing all the hallmarks of his late style, Ignorance is a masterpiece of precision.
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