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The
2004 Award
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Nominated by:
Publishers
of Nominated Editions:
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Ignorance
by Milan Kundera |
| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors |
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ABOUT
THE BOOK
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| 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. Milan Kundera is an author who can take such dizzying concepts as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transform them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
| The
Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived
in France, his second homeland, for more than twenty years. He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, The Farewell Party, The Books of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves--all originally in Czech. His most recent novels, Slowness, Identity and Ignorance, as well as his non-fiction works, The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French. |
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