Ignorance
Milan Kundera, translated by Linda Asher Faber and Faber, 195pp, £16.99
ISBN 0571215505
Not so much a novel as an essay in the guise of an anecdote, Ignorance discusses ideas about exile and tells the story of Josef and Irena, two Czechs who've lived abroad for many years and meet by chance on a plane when they revisit Prague. Irena has a romantic memory of Josef from their youth; she still keeps a cafe ashtray he stole to give her.
Josef, unfortunately, is having a Seinfeld moment. He doesn't recollect Irena. They arrange to meet up once they've done the rounds of friends and relations, but he still hasn't found out what her name is, and he's let the pretence of recognition go on too long to ask. Well, five seconds would be too long. An awkward upshot beckons.
Milan Kundera, resident in France for decades and now writing in French, gives a slightly strained explanation of his title, to cover wider matters than Josef's lapse. He remarks on the way different languages handle nostalgia or homesickness and says that the Spanish word anoranza is "derived from the Latin ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss)".
Homer, he claims, "glorified nostalgia". The Odyssey builds up to "the Great Return", but according to Kundera's sums, Odysseus must have spent longer living with Calypso than he ever did with his wife, Penelope, before he left for the Trojan War, so to "extol Penelope's pain and sneer at Calypso's tears" may not be logical. Odysseus and Penelope are relative strangers. In addition, Kundera says the homecoming would be anticlimactic because everyone Odysseus met on his wanderings took an interest in his story, whereas no one in Ithaca would want to hear about it.
In terms of epic poetry, this seems counter-intuitive. One rather imagines the loyal subjects packing the hall to hear what the long-lost king's been up to. But it does make sense that old Czech acquaintances avoid too much talk of Josef's life in Copenhagen, or Irena's in Paris. (Incidentally, we never learn why Josef should be on a Paris-Prague flight, except for plot requirements.) People tend to reclaim exiles by referring to old times shared, not to the foreign scene they don't know.
Josef finds this incuriosity deeply offputting. He tells Irena, "It's only when you come back to the country after a long absence that you notice the obvious: people aren't interested in one another, it's normal." Irena says that her French friends find her less interesting since the fall of communism, now that she is no longer in refuge from oppression.
Kundera digresses here and there to look at the other characters. Irena's mother is cool towards her: "Perhaps because of Irena's father, her first husband, whom she had despised? We won't indulge in that sort of cheap psychologising." Irena's current boyfriend is "incapable of living on his own without women's caretaking", but wary of women's "demands, their arguments, their tears, and even their too-present, too-expansive bodies".
This fear of women's physicality goes all the way back to Kundera's first novel, The Joke (1967). Here, the idea is enlarged to encompass "the horror of being a body" in general, something experienced by Irena's friend Milada, who has stayed single as a result. We discover that Milada, now going wrinkly, is the once-beautiful girl that Josef guiltily remembers rejecting for no good reason in his teens. He's never seen her since, and doesn't know that she knows about his current visit.
Kundera notes the paradox that nostalgia "is most powerful in early youth, when the volume of life gone by is quite small". Back then, Milada's regret for her lost love made her suicidal. Kundera wonders whether the whole idea of love depends on the brevity of life. If we lived to be 160 we might not invest any one relationship with such importance. He thinks the idea of "homeland" would have less pull too, because there would be far more time to make ourselves at home in other countries and cultures. What really concerns him in this elegantly disillusioned book is not the phenomenon of exile after all but the fact of mortality.
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