Nevědění

Czech emigrant Irena has lived in France since she fled Czechoslovakia after the Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968. In 1989, when the Velvet Revolution overthrows the ruling Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Irena decides to return to her home country after twenty years of living in exile. During her journey, she meets Josef, a fellow emigrant who was briefly her lover in Prague.

The novel presents a poignant picture of love and its manifestations, a recurring theme in Kundera's novels. The novel explores the feelings evoked by returning to a homeland that has ceased to be home. In doing so, it reinterprets the Odyssean theme of homecoming.
We always assume that our memories coincide with those of a loved one, that we have experienced the same thing. But that's an illusion. On the other hand, what can we expect from our weak memory? It records only a "meaningless, insignificant particle" of the past, "and no one knows why this particular piece and not another". We live our lives drowned in a vast oblivion, a fact we refuse to acknowledge. Only those who return after twenty years, like Ulysses returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and amazed.
Not Knowing, Milan Kundera's penultimate novel written in French, is published for the first time in an English translation by Anna Karenina. With an afterword by Sylvia Richterová.

Czech edition