Book Review: Ignorance by Milan Kundera
“The Greek word for “return” is nostos. Algos means “suffering.” So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
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One word to describe this book: MEMORIES.
It’s my first time to read a Milan Kundera book and as I’ve heard, he really is great author who mostly conveys to books in both Czech and French, apparently cause he’s Czech and French. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke. (but I don’t even know every single book he wrote except this one)
So there I was stumbling in this book at my local bookstore and I was so intrigued by stories where memories have been lost, past experiences and lost loves. Well, not really being so melodramatic here, I’m just saying. Hoho.Well anyway this book is really good. I was so bored at the first few pages, but when I get to chapter 5 and above, I’m getting engrossed by the second. There are so many things you can learn from Milan Kundera.
So the story is actually about s man and a woman met by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier when they chose to become exiles. 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. Then again, what can we expect of our weak memory? It 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, a fact we refuse to recognize. Only those who return after twenty years, like Odysseus returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance firsthand.
The wordplay was fascinating, it really gives key points where I write it down on a sticky note and post it on my corkboard wall for future references + inspiration .
Read it, you’ll learn a lot about destiny, fate and so much more about past.
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Much Love,
