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Ignorance

By Milan Kundera
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Check link for latest rating. ( 27,233 ratings, 2,310 reviews)
Book Hero Magic crafted this summary to help describe this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Summary
Ignorance by Milan Kundera explores the lives of two Czech expatriates, Irena and Josef, who return to their homeland after years of living abroad. As they reconnect and confront their past, the novel delves into themes of memory, nostalgia, and the complexities of homecoming. It's a poignant reflection on the human experience of longing and belonging.
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Format: Paperback / softback
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Book Hero Magic created this recommendation. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! IS THIS YOUR NEXT READ?

This book may appeal to you if you are intrigued by explorations of memory, identity, and the intertwining of personal and historical events. Set against the backdrop of emigration and the search for belonging, it delves into the lives of characters grappling with the realities of returning to a home that feels both familiar and foreign. It's a poignant journey that blends philosophical musings with the emotional complexities of human relationships.

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Ignorance

A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned 20 years earlier when they chose to become exiles. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history?

The bestselling masterpiece of love and exile in Prague by the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Book Hero Magic formatted this description to make it easier to read. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! Description

In Ignorance, Milan Kundera takes up the complex and emotionally charged theme of exile and creates from it a literary masterpiece. A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their Czech homeland in the early 1990s after twenty years of self-imposed exile. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted by the tides of history?

The truth is that after such a long absence 'their memories no longer match'. We live our lives sunk in a vast forgetting, and we refuse to see it. Only those who return after twenty years, like Ulysses returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance first-hand.

Milan Kundera has taken these dizzying concepts of absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and orchestrated them into a polyphonic and moving work.

Book Hero Magic summarised reviews for this book. While it's new and still learning, it may not be perfect - your feedback is welcome! HOW HAS THIS BEEN REVIEWED?

Ignorance by Milan Kundera has been praised for its beautiful writing and is described as a masterful, entertaining, and thought-provoking novel. It is lauded for its literary excellence, combining irony, wit, and vivid characters. Critics highlight its emotional depth, intellectual payoff, and the poignant exploration of themes such as desire, loss, and memory.

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780571215515

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Format: Paperback / softback

Date Published: 04 September 2003

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Faber & Faber

Edition: Main - Re-issue

Contributors:

  • Translated by Linda Asher
  • Translated by Linda Asher

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 12.0mm

Width: 126.0mm

Height: 198.0mm

Weight: 172g

Pages: 208

Collections

Fiction General Fiction Literary Fiction Milan Kundera

About the Author

Milan Kundera, born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, was a student when the Czech Communist regime was established in 1948, and later worked as a labourer, jazz musician and professor at the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies in Prague. After the Russian invasion in August 1968, his books were proscribed. In 1975, he and his wife settled in France, and in 1981, he became a French citizen. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life is Elsewhere, Farewell Waltz, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and of the short-story collection Laughable Loves - all originally in Czech. His most recent novels, Slowness, Identity and Ignorance, as well as his non-fiction works The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.

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