“Ignorance” by Milan Kundera

Ignorance: A Novel

By Milan Kundera
2002
202 pages. Audio: 4 hours and 23 minutes
Fiction

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Would anyone care for some really smart fiction? Or to start with a different question, who is the greatest living writer who hasn’t won a Nobel Prize? My pick is Milan Kundera, a Czechoslovakian who has more or less lived in exile in France for almost a half century. Kundera considers himself a French writer, and all of his later books were originally written in French. While his writing clearly wrestles with questions of politics, he resists the categorization of a political writer. What he is, it seems to me, is someone trying to work out in fiction the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.

Kundera’s best work was admittedly done before 2000. His last novel, The Festival of Insignificance, is a hopeless mess. However, Ignorance is quite a good novel but more about that momentarily.

Kundera’s three greatest novels are, in my opinion, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality. Along with the aforementioned Ignorance, you can almost detect the recurring themes in his work.

Being Czechoslovakian, Kundera constantly wrestles with the threat of totalitarianism and oppression. His books were banned in Czechoslovakia after the Soviet Union crackdown. And you get the feeling he is always struggling with seeing the country he knows disappear before his eyes even though it is still there.

But there is an even deeper philosophical project going on here. Many consider The Unbearable Lightness of Being his greatest novel and I concur. Kundera’s question is, after Nietzsche has declared the death of God and the end of transcendence, where are we to find meaning? What gives being weight? What can give life enough significance that it doesn’t just float away? If you take seriously Nietzsche’s notion of eternal recurrence—the notion that everything that ever happens occurs again and again through all eternity—how can any single individual or event really matter?

There is often a good bit of sex in his novels, but none of it appears to be really satisfying. It doesn’t look like anybody’s having any fun here. Memory and history are also brought into question in terms of both their reliability and meaning. If this all sounds rather gloomy I suppose it is, but Kundera has a great sense for humor and the absurd. While he often talks about oppression, I do not find the reading oppressing.

So back to our book Ignorance. A man and a woman return to their homeland after a 20-year absence in which they have been in exile, and attempt to pick up the thread of their relationship from two decades before. Not only has there been an interruption in this relationship, but they don’t even have the same memories of what it was previously.

The book flap describes it thus: “Milan Kundera is the only author today who can take such dizzying concepts as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance and transform them into material for a novel.” That sounds about right to me.

Why should a preacher read Kundera? There’s no one else who faces more squarely the conundrum of living in a post-Nietzsche world. Kundera is 90. Is that Nobel ever going to come?