Milan Kundera: Ignorance

By JANE WESTAWAY

Milan Kundera's work lies at the unfashionable end of an axis representing the significance of meaning in fiction. Its other pole is glamorously occupied by what has been dubbed hysterical realism.

This, according to critic James Wood, is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. Stories and sub-stories sprout on every page. There is a pursuit of vitality at all costs.

Think Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie and Don DeLillo, and depending on your taste and mood, and what you think fiction is for, Kundera comes as an unreadable bore or a blessed balm.

He trained as a philosopher and it shows. He deals in the big questions of human existence. His work is heavily freighted with meaning, which he doesn't flinch from making explicit. The first few chapters of Ignorance deal in a frankly scholarly manner with Greek mythology (Odysseus' return home), etymology (the Latin root of the word nostalgia introducing the element of ignorance), and European history (the rise and fall of Czech Communism).

Certainly the novel opens on a brief conversation between two characters, but already you sense that Kundera's characters slip on to the page as exemplars; that he is using them the way a mathematician uses the alphabet: x + y = z. So it comes as a surprise to find you're thinking of them days after you've finished the book.

Irena, whom we meet on page one, and her husband were hounded out of Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Russian takeover. She has, with some struggle and difficulty, made a life in Paris, her husband having died there. Twenty years on, she is making another visit home.

At the airport, she meets Josef, also an emigre, returning home from Denmark for the first time. Years ago, they had a brief, promising encounter that Irena has never forgotten. Josef is friendly and they agree to meet in Prague.

For Kundera and his characters, the past is literally another country. Anyone who has gone home across time and distance will recognise Irena and Josef's exasperation with relatives and friends who have no interest whatsoever in their new lives, or why they ever left the old ones. Only Irena and Josef treasure their pasts, so that their eventual meeting promises a kind of salvation.

Kundera gets them to this point via a series of low-key scenes less crucial for what happens than for what Irena and Josef and Kundera himself think about what happens.

And Kundera is never afraid of puncturing the fictional bubble, his intermittent first-person remarks coming as a reminder that it is not character, scene and story that finally matter, but meaning.

My only reservation lies with the translation. Though Linda Asher translated Kundera's last two novels written in his adopted French, this one seems to lack their grace and credibility.

But if you're tired of compulsive zaniness, of fiction that is terrified of silence, try Kundera. He gives you something to think about.

* Faber and Faber, $34.95

* Jane Westaway is a Wellington writer.