Ignorance
Tags
Summary
The novel follows a heroine who returns to her native Czech Republic after twenty years in exile. En route she runs into an old acquaintance at a Paris airport, but the past is not what it was; an interrupted story is always hard to resume, and a return is always hard to settle into. This is a Ulysses-like story in which homeland, nostalgia, love, selfhood, aging, and reality are woven together layer upon layer, as Kundera once again displays his cool and melancholic narrative gift for moving between lightness and weight.
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in exile literature and migrant identity
- Fans of fiction that combines philosophical speculation with narrative art
- Readers seeking a deeper understanding of the 'memory and forgetting' motif in Kundera's work
- Those undergoing cultural or geographical displacement who have personal thoughts on 'return'
Not a good fit for
- Readers seeking strong plot and fast-paced narrative
- Readers impatient with or uninterested in existential philosophical discussion
Reading tips
- Read Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being first to grasp his basic style and themes before entering this book
- Don't force a linear reading; pause as the chapters allow and savor the reflections and metaphors
- Read alongside Kundera's literary essay The Art of the Novel to understand his creative principles
About the publisher
Shanghai Translation Publishing House is a Chinese publisher oriented mainly toward translation and publishing. Its publications cover foreign literature, world classics and classic works, as well as social culture, folk literature and classical poetry. The database contains 2,618 titles, including Never Let Me Go, Les Misérables (2 volumes), Don Quixote (illustrated collector's edition), The Complete Comedies of Molière (4 volumes), The Complete Novels of Kafka (3 volumes), The Collected Works of Dostoevsky (9-volume set), Reason and Persons, and Oedipus Rex (Translation Classics). Its author resources include foreign writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Victor Hugo, Cervantes and Molière, as well as translators such as Zheng Kelu, Sun Jiameng, Li Jianwu and Zhang Kun. The publisher has brands such as "Translation Classics Selections" and "Translation Documentary," and emphasizes translated works in foreign literature and the humanities and social sciences, while also publishing bilingual dictionaries and foreign-language educational books. Public information is limited; the above is based on the book information in the database.
Contents
- 版权信息
- 版权申明
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16
- 17
- 18
- 19
- 20
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
- 25
- 26
- 27
- 28
- 29
- 30
- 31
- 32
- 33
- 34
- 35
- 36
- 37
- 38
- 39
- 40
- 41
- 42
- 43
- 44
- 45
- 46
- 47
- 48
- 49
- 50
- 51
- 52
- 53
FAQ
What distinguishes Ignorance from Kundera's other works?
Does this book require prior knowledge of the historical background?
What exactly does 'ignorance' mean in this book?
Related on WeRead
Comments
Find this book
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
About the author
Milan Kundera (1929–2023) was a Czech-born French writer. Born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, he went into exile in France in 1975, became a French citizen in 1981, and regained Czech citizenship in 2019. Known for his philosophical novels, he placed his characters' lives under the pressure of politics and history, exploring themes such as love, memory, forgetting, and identity. His narratives are interwoven with essayistic reflection, creating a distinctive form that lies between the novel and the essay. His major works include The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Joke, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, as well as Life Is Elsewhere, The Farewell Party, Laughable Loves, Ignorance, and Identity, along with essay collections such as Testaments Betrayed and The Curtain. His works have been translated into many languages and have had a profound influence on contemporary literature.
Xu Jun is a translator long engaged in the translation and study of foreign literature. Public information about him is limited, and his dates of birth and death, nationality, and educational background are not clearly recorded. Twelve of his works are held in the collection, covering French and European literary classics as well as writers' biographies. His representative translations include volumes such as Cousin Bette from the Balzac collection, along with The Alder King, A Man of Letters, Ignorance, The Interrogation, and Milan Kundera: A Writer's Life. There is also A Man of Letters: Selected Translations by Xu Jun, which presents his translation style. Judging from these titles, he focuses on French literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, covering both novels and biographies, and his translations attend closely to the tone and narrative rhythm of the originals, giving him a certain influence in the translation of foreign literature and world classics.
