A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier when they chose to become exiles. Will they manage to pick up the thread of their strange love story, interrupted almost as soon as it began and then lost in the tides of history? 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.

"It is not entirely unfair to suggest that Milan Kundera may be a didactician of the comic rather than a comic novelist....Ignorance, for all its local delights, is an angry book compressed into a slight one, and it seesaws between slender theorizing and slender storytelling....In this way the novel enforces the very complaints that it makes, and the result is an arrested book that seems not to desire to change a situation so much as to freeze it, the better to attack it. For all his anger, on the evidence of this strange book Milan Kundera would like things to stay much the same." James Wood, The New Republic (read the entire New Republic review)

Precise and spare ... page by page this novel is dazzling.

“ Precise and spare … page by page this novel is dazzling.”