An Enchanting House of Ideas
KOHLER, SHEILA
An Enchanting House of Ideas Ignorance By Milan Kundera Translated by Linda Asher HarperCollins. 208 pp. $23.95. Reviewed by Sheila Köhler Author, "Children of Pithiviers," "Cracks" and...
...First, he tells an engaging story...
...He cuts his scenes skillfully, withholding essential information...
...it was something else entirely: Visions of landscapes would blink on in her head unexpectedly, abruptly, swiftly, and go out instantly...
...Kundera also teaches us, and thus fulfills Nabokov's second stipulation...
...In addition, he gives us anew the precise details of Odysseus' voyage and homecoming, the names of numerous patriot poets from all the small nations of Europe, plus a wonderful and succinct précis of the recent Czech past: "The history of the Czechs in the 20th century is graced with remarkable mathematical beauty due to the triple repetition of the number 20...
...Kundera knows how to keep us turning the pages...
...And Josef was doubly guilty...
...They never stop thinking or talking...
...Irena is the mother of two girls, yet they rarely come up...
...But he is able in Ignorance to turn his house of ideas into a believable and moving edifice...
...in the house of her life there are windows now, windows opening to the rear, onto what she has experienced...
...But Ignorance is not merely a novel of ideas...
...Elsewhere he says frankly, "For let's look at Irena's life after Martin died: She had nobody left to speak Czech with...
...Now at the table he made a garbled effort to explain (to them and to himself both) his psychology as an adolescent, but the words had trouble getting out of his mouth because the sister-in-law's set smile, fastened on him, expressed an immutable disagreement with everything he was saying...
...The Czech author, though he now writes in French, follows the tradition of the 19th-century Slavic novelists...
...Reviewed by Sheila Köhler Author, "Children of Pithiviers," "Cracks" and "The House on R Street" Milan Kundera might easily have called his dark new novel The Great Return, an ironic phrase he uses to describe the central plot...
...Josef's fluctuating feelings for them are honestly delineated: "Looking at the sister-in-law, Josef remembered that he had never liked her...
...But later there is a shift...
...We are concerned about the fate of his two key players, Irena and Josef, who meet briefly by chance in the Paris airport when returning to their native country, the Czech Republic...
...Will Irena realize that Josef has no recollection of her at all...
...This is Kundera at his best...
...Sex aside, there are numerous instances where we are entirely caught up in the lives of these characters, whose most private and revealing thoughts seem to mirror our own with exactitude and veracity...
...Irena's relationship with her mother, one of many funny aspects of the book, is true to life and well drawn: "Irena had always felt less pretty and less intelligent in her [mother's] presence...
...His old antipathy (she'd returned it in spades) now seemed to him stupid and regrettable...
...While delivering these miniature essays-the novel is divided into short numbered sections-Kundera proves himself a virtuoso of fiction...
...Here, besides the detailed bedroom episode involving Irena and Josef, he daringly describes a lovemaking session between Irena's boyfriend and her mother, that includes a wonderfully erotic dance before a mirror...
...He understood that there was nothing he could do about it...
...Explaining how Irena, an East European woman living in France, imagines her homeland, he tells us, "No, this was not daydreaming-lengthy and conscious, willed...
...Still, Kundera frequently manages to meet Nabokov's third and most demanding standard: He enchants us, giving us that telltale tingle in the spine...
...His characters may not linger on in the mind...
...Talking was like flying...
...With them, judgments precede experience.' Kundera shares his wisdom as well about the tricks of memory and time, and the effects of emigration not only on those who leave but on the families left behind...
...The author also limns a portrait of Josef's going back to the bosom of his family that evokes the cupidity in all of us...
...We further learn about Czech politics, Communism, Arnold Schönberg, and the French people: "Oh, the French you know -they have no need for experience...
...urination...
...And he does not hesitate to use the first person to comment on his characters: "(I note: She feels encouraged the way Gustaf did, years back, when he learned Martin's age...
...that one ends in 1968 when, enraged by the country's insolent self-emancipation, the Russians invaded with half a million soldiers...
...the origins of the word nostalgia...
...Kundera fulfills Vladimir Nabokov's three requirements for a good writer...
...copulation...
...Like The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality and his other works of fiction, this is a book of ideas...
...in extended conversations they discuss their feelings, their politics, the meaning of life...
...people who see their lives as a shipwreck need to hunt down the guilty parties...
...His characters are reminiscent of those we find in Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Mikhail Lermontov...
...At times he employs the Dickensian trick of hiding a character's true identity...
...Both Irena and Josef, who have dead spouses, react to their Bohemian homecoming in very similar ways...
...from now on her existence will be inconceivable without these windows...
...At certain moments, though, the central figures seem a little too much alike, almost interchangeable...
...The reader is even informed about what the usually competent translator awkwardly calls "the crotch...
...He is, of course, past master of the sex scene...
...What he wants most from his brother and sister-in-law is an old painting dear to his heart...
...Sometimes Kundera playfully sticks his head through the curtain to speak to us directly, as Nikolai Gogol did...
...We wonder whether they will find each other again and remain together...
...Ultimately, however, they appear to resemble not only each other but above all their creator, Kundera...
...it was practically a law...
...Instead he chose Ignorance, underscoring how little we know about our past and future, and above all about one another...
...In 1918, after several centuries, they achieved their independence and in 1938 they lost it...
...He intermingles the private destinies of his protagonists with the great themes of life and death, remembering and forgetting, knowledge and ignorance, telling and concealing, past and future...
...Surveying Irena's sleeping body after a scene of some passion, Josef has an arresting thought: "He was still looking at her crotch, that tiny little area which with admirable economy and space provides four sovereign functions: arousal...
...The occupier took over in full force in the autumn of 1969 and then, to everyone's surprise, took off in autumn 1989quietly, politely, as did all the Communist regimes in Europe at that time...
...How often had she run to the mirror for reassurance that she wasn't ugly, didn't look like an idiot...
...The illusion necessary to immerse us in these fictional lives, therefore, occasionally wears thin...
...Josef is supposed to be a veterinarian, yet we never hear much about animals except for one overly exuberant German shepherd dragged in for effect...
...procreation...
...the joys of returning to one's native tongue following a long period speaking another: "Using it he felt light, like after a diet...
...Who can forget those sequences in The Unbearable Lightness of Being where even a protagonist's cold and fever were rendered erotic...
...Relating the rueful parting of Josef's youthful girlfriend, Kundera depicts the birth of nostalgia with precision and eloquence: "That feeling, that irrepressible yearning to return, suddenly reveals to her the existence of the past, the power of the past, of her past...
...In a flashback episode from Irena's childhood, for example, he leaves her young friend Milada asleep in extreme cold and snow after taking too many sleeping pills...
...We know she will survive the suicide attempt, but we do not know how...
...He is particularly insightful on matters of language: how dirty words arouse when heard in the mother tongue, but not in a foreign one...
...Kundera knows human nature and, amazingly, portrays women with great accuracy...
...In 1948 the Communist revolution, imported from Moscow, inaugurated the country's second 20-year span...
...her daughters refused to waste their time with such an obviously useless language...
Vol. 85 • September 2002 • No. 5
