Strangers to the reader too
Robert Edric
IGNORANCE by Milan Kundera Faber, £16.99, pp. 195,
ISBN 0571215505
It is an increasingly popular opening gambit among reviewers to ask at the outset of a review what a particular book is about, or what it is for, what purpose it serves, or what the writer's intention was in writing it. This has always seemed a somewhat disingenuous exercise, especially in light of the review which then follows, and which invariably concentrates on answering these otherwise pointless and unanswerable questions.
In Ignorance, Kundera has produced a slight novella which, often clumsily and bluntly, explores the concepts of émigré longing, of nostalgia, homesickness and the reinvention of the lives of people caught up in events beyond their control. As in all of Kundera's work there can never be any doubt that the narrator of events is Kundera himself, and that, in a Beckettian sense, the teller and the tale are indivisible, meaningless, one without the other. Sometimes this indivisibility works; sometimes it does not.
Ignorance is the tale of two émigrés — Irena and Josef — who meet by chance upon their return to Prague from, respectively, Paris and Denmark. Both were forced into exile at the time of the revolution 30 years earlier, and both are returning now in search of something of their lost and former selves. Irena recognises Josef, but Josef only pretends to recognise Irena so that he might engineer a sexual encounter with her, which is what she herself clearly wants and anticipates. Only when they are making love does Irena finally realise that Josef does not know her. Irena then meets an old friend, for whom Josef truly was her first love, the loss of whom leads her to attempt suicide and lose an ear in the process. Meanwhile, during her absence, Irena's partner is seduced by her mother, who was staying with them.
Upon this frequently implausible and contrived structure is hung a great deal of philosophising concerning the nature of loss and forgetting; of the need to remember and to forget in creating things anew; in restructuring the past and preparing for the future. There is a great deal of portentous commentary here, often bordering on the absurd, Consider:
He knew very well that his memory detested him, that it did nothing but slander him; therefore he tried not to believe it and to be more lenient towards his own life.
Something similar is revealed on almost every sparsely printed page of Ignorance.
There is nothing here that Kundera has not already dealt with in greater depth and to considerably greater effect elsewhere. Immortality, Slowness and Identity may occasionally read like essays of exploration upon which characters and some sort of narrative structure have been imposed, but at least there the stories, the characters and the ideas they are created to embody are moulded into a satisfying whole. Here the characters are pointedly presented as empty ciphers and made to endure their implausible (and occasionally risible) encounters solely in the service of tired ideas, which themselves struggle to bear the weight Kundera places upon them He speaks of 'nostalgic sufficiency' and of people suffering from the 'masochistic distortion of memory'. Consider, too:
For how can a person with no knowledge of the future understand the meaning of the present? If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?
There is a superficiality to this tale — a striving for significance, resonance and meaning which quickly defeats Kundera's purpose.
And just as those opening self-defeating gambits have become common currency, so it is equally common these days to come away from a novel feeling that its characters remain strangers, uncared for by the reader, and quickly forgotten. It is a much rarer thing to come away from a novel feeling that the author is deliberately estranging himself from the reader, walking away through a succession of mirrored doors until he has vanished from sight, leaving only the reader's puzzled gaze staring back at him and mouthing, 'What was it all about, what was it for, what was the writer's intention?'
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