Ignorance

Ignorance by Milan Kundera easily could have been called The book of  Leaving and Forgetting, because it is filled genuine insight as well as clever comment or clearly recognizable human foibles. It visits places that we have all been to without itself becoming redundant.
Kundera writes that ignorance is "derived from de Latin word ignorare". He links it, etymologically, with the word nostalgia, which he says: "seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don´t know what is happening there".

Like his main characters, Irena and Josef, Kundera is a Czech emigrant. Much of his previous writing has concerned the out-of-place feeling the emigrant´s experience generates.

Irena, his female character, left Czechoslovakia in 1968 following the Russian takeover of the country because her husband was hounded by the authorities for supposedly anti-governmental views. They fled to Paris where -after several years- her husband died. Irena is left on her own. Josef, a veterinarian from a family of higher status physicians, likewise escapes what he sees as the subjugation of his countrymen to a midless Communism. He goes to Denmark where he sets up a practice and marries a Dane. Both, Irena and Josef, are frustrated that no one seems to want they did while away. It is as if none of this ever happened. And the two of them seem only able to look back.

Irena and Josef cling to the past, to memories, which they have constructed, as the reader slowly sees, very much the hard way. Perhaps Josef and Irena put too much trust in memory.

Perhaps they look back too often, try to move ahead, hoping to return magically to where they first began. Perhaps, this behavior is ignorance. Or perhaps, it is simply out lot, our nature as humans. Kundera does well in making a creative and generally empathetic case for this final conjecture.