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Milan Kundera has one of the most unique and immediately recognizable writing styles I’ve ever encountered. Ignorance is the third of his novels I’ve read, and there was never any doubt in my mind while reading it that, yep, it’s him all right. I find this experience of familiarity with an author quite pleasant. The other two novels of his that I’ve read (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting) are “better,” I suppose it ought to be said, but Ignorance is another excellent if brief meditation on Kundera’s classic themes—love, relationships, memory, history, politics, etc. Kundera reminds me of Yeats in the way he mixes the personal and the public/political. It’s amazing that he is able to educate the reader enough on 20th Century Czech history during the novel(s) to join him as he points out the truly fascinating things going on throughout it. The connections Kundera consistently makes between large-scale political actions affecting an entire nation of people and subtle, private moments between two lovers are nothing short of brilliant. Ignorance is about coming back, or the impossibility of coming back, or no… how coming back is complicated. It’s about how some things change, and other things stay the same, and neither is what you would have predicted. Two Czech emigrants return to Prague after the fall of Communism, and their complex relationships with their home and with each other are not simplified but further entangled. After years of questions about themselves, their friends, and their country, their Grand Returns defy expectations and leave them with more, and more challenging, questions. Perhaps what is most enjoyable about Kundera is his conversationalist tone, as if he’s sitting in the room with you just sharing his observations and ideas over a drink. He does not simply present a scene and leave you to interpret and analyze it as you will, but instead is quite eager to tell you why he finds it so fascinating (and in a pretty straightforward and affable manner). I’ve never disagreed with him. I really ought to own at least one of his books so that I can underline and note various sentences and paragraphs—not only are they profound and moving in their often bittersweet simplicity now, but I suspect I will have a wonderful time rereading at least one of his books in the future when I find myself in a completely different stage of my life. Then again, maybe it’s appropriate that I’m not highlighting and annotating in the margins, because when I reread Kundera in the future, the text will be the same, but I won’t be, and all the scribbles and circles and stars I may trace next to and around the ink on the page won’t allow me to completely recapture then what I’m experiencing with the text now. How bittersweet. How Kundera.

2020-12-13 15:27