L’Ignorance
Presentation copy inscribed by Kundera to Maurice Nadeau: “Pour Maurice Nadeau, avec mon fidèle souvenir, Milan Kundera.”
Published directly in French by Gallimard in 2003, L’Ignorance is one of Kundera’s novels of exile and return. With cold melancholy, Kundera revisits the question of Czech emigration after 1968 and the impossibility of returning home. Irena, settled in France for twenty years, and Josef, living in Denmark, return to Prague after the fall of communism. But this return, expected by others as a moral certainty, mends nothing: the past has shifted, memories no longer coincide, and those who stayed and those who left no longer speak quite the same inner language — a mutual ignorance, and a relentless portrait of the unwitting cruelty of those who demand that a return erase the life lived elsewhere.
A fine copy of the first printing, presented to one of Kundera’s faithful and constant companions.