“Kundera once more delivers a seductive, intelligent entertainment … [with] elegance and grace.” — Washington Post Book World
“Nothing short of masterful.” — Newsweek
A brilliant novel set in contemporary Prague, by one of the most distinguished writers of our time.
A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned 20 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. Only those who return after 20 years, like Ulysses returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance first-hand.
Kundera is the only author today who can take dizzying concepts such as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transform them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work.
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“Moving … There is a painful injustice and inequality to memory, which these encounters beautifully illustrate.”
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Boston Globe