It is an increasingly popular opening gambit among reviewers to ask at the outset of a review what a particular book is about, or what it is for, what purpose it serves, or what the writer's intention was in writing it. This has always seemed a somewhat disingenuous exercise, especially in light of the review which then follows, and which invariably concentrates on answering these otherwise pointless and unanswerable questions.
In Ignorance, Kundera has produced a slight novella which, often clumsily and bluntly, explores the concepts of ZmigrZ longing, of nostalgia, homesickness and the reinvention of the lives of people caught up in events beyond their control. As in all of Kundera's work there can never be any doubt that the narrator of events is Kundera himself, and that, in a Beckettian sense, the teller and the tale are indivisible, meaningless, one without the other. Sometimes this indivisibility works; sometimes it does not.
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