The bestselling masterpiece tale of love and exile in Prague by the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 'An artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere.' Salman Rushdie A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier when they chose to become exiles. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a ...
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The bestselling masterpiece tale of love and exile in Prague by the author of modern classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 'An artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere.' Salman Rushdie A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier when they chose to become exiles. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? The truth is that after such a long absence 'their memories no longer match.' We always believe that our memories coincide with those of the person we loved, that we experienced the same thing. But this is just an illusion as the memory records only 'an insignificant, minuscule particle' of the past, 'and no one knows why it's this bit and not any other bit.' 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 transformed them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work.
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Seller's Description:
Good. Ships in a BOX from Central Missouri! May not include working access code. Will not include dust jacket. Has used sticker(s) and some writing or highlighting. UPS shipping for most packages, (Priority Mail for AK/HI/APO/PO Boxes).
Milan Kundera has a gift for putting into words the most minute feelings that all human beings have, a way to give name to that which we have felt but never been able to name. This is totally evident in Ignorance, a magical book dealing with the concepts of exile and memory - its flaws, its shared nature, it's capacity to both give us a home and detach us from progress. In its two main characters, and their surrounding circle of friends and family, Kundera is able to show us how most of us relate to the experience of being away from the place where we were known and grew up, and the possibilities and pitfalls of any return to it - having lived away from my country of birth for 10 years now, I found myself on the verge of tears at various points, and recognized many of the wonderful and infuriating traits we all develop in this situation.
A magical book, even if towards the end it unravels a little. A most recommended read.