Book Review: Ignorance

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera took Nietzsche's principle of eternal return and applied it to sex and character and, by extension, to Czechoslovakia. The meaning of it, for the purpose of the novel, was that reality can only be found in endless repetition of events; that the fleeting passion, the passing state, leave just faint and meaningless traces of memory.

Now in his seventies, and writing only in his adopted French, Kundera is still disturbed by the problem of return. But this time the problem is literal rather than existential: it is the anguish of the emigre who, like Odysseus, spends his whole story dreaming of home, but, unlike Odysseus, knows that he can't return because his homeland is gone or changed completely. And, of course, Czechoslovakia is gone, having emerged and disappeared somewhere between the passing fantasies of the Austro-Hungarian and communist empires.

You'd have thought that the urgency of Kundera's writing would also pass with age and with the changing of his language. He calls Ignorance a novel, but it is short, a novella really, and it merely describes a brief episode in the life of two middle-aged Czech emigres who have a last trip home, and a last fling, before accepting the inevitable vanishing of the past.

There is, however, a gripping lyrical intensity to this book. Just as Kundera's great early novels seemed to speak to the whole Eastern European experience, so Ignorance - though more quietly - seems to speak to the post-communist one. A widower, Josef, who has been living in Denmark, goes back to Prague for the first time in 20 years. He seeks out a friend, a former party apparatchik, to whom he wants to offer support, should there ever be a trial for old communist hacks.

But Josef's friend is unconcerned by his past and shrugs at the reappearance of capitalism; it's just something that happened. He points to his children. "They don't think like you any more," he says to Josef. "They're somewhere else."

The only person Josef finds anything in common with in the new Czech Republic is Irena, another emigre. Irena has also found that none of her old friends in Prague is interested in her. She remembers the nightmares she used to have when she first fled, of being captured or forced to return. Now, when she returns voluntarily, the drama of her exile appears to have touched nobody. "The emigration dream," Kundera explains: "one of the strangest phenomena of the second half of the 20th century."

Irena and Josef meet at the airport when Irena recognises him as a man she had flirted with a long time ago. The memory of it has stayed with her like a souvenir of home. They have dinner, and then sex, finding their release by talking dirty to each other in Czech. It is a wonderful Kundera moment, the lives of his characters and his philosophical asides coming - in both senses of the word - together.

Then, with a shock, Irena realises that Josef had never recognised her. He had just played along. They have experiences in common, but not memories. And in these castaways of history, Kundera finds a terrible, deeply moving, poetry of loss.