Exile May you live in interesting times!
This old Chinese curse haunts the fractured destinies of refugees of this, so called, Christian world. There is something breathtakingly unrealistic about the way our sisterly-motherly-fatherly-brotherly- world views its very own flesh & blood.
· Editorial even Jesus would be proud of [Sydney Morning Herald]
What am I still doing here? Me, Myself and I so Ignorant
Kundera asks a question he has probably often heard during his years in France: Is it true that emigration causes artists to lose their creativity?
Ignorance is derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss). At the wise age of 73, a Bohemian, by temperament and birth, writer links ignorance, etymologically, with the word nostalgia, which seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away and I don't know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don't know what is happening there.
Odysseus, king of Ithaca, left home to fight in the Trojan War; it was two decades before he was able to return to the land and the wife he loved. Ignorance, Milan Kundera's latest novel, casts Odysseus' longing for home in a modern light. This exploration of exile and return, of nostalgia and of hope and loss, fuses past and present, myth and reality, intuition and understanding to meet Kundera's stated goal of revealing a fragment of human existence.
The very notion of homeland with all its emotional power, is bound up with the relative brevity of our life, which allows us too little time to become attached to some other country, to other countries, to other languages.
According to Irene, the French, for whom judgments precede experience, were already thoroughly informed that Stalinism is an evil and emigration is a tragedy. They weren't interested in what we thought, they were interested in us as living proof of what they thought.
Several years ago the historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote a book about his return to East Germany after the fall of Communism. It was called 'The File,' and took its title from the file the East German state police kept on him while he was doing research there. At the core of the book was an inquiry into how memory makes us what we are, and how it may be only another kind of imagination. Who was the real Timothy Garton Ash? The figure codenamed 'Romeo' he read about in his files, or the person he remembered himself to be? What common identity do they share?
Garton Ash’s return to post-Communist Berlin is cast in the language of Graham Greene and John LeCarre, but he might have borrowed from the work of Milan Kundera. Now living in Paris and writing in French, Kundera, an expatriate Czech, has long been exploring themes of exile and memory similar to those encountered by Garton Ash. There is even a moment in Ignorance when Josef, one of the main characters, is confronted with his own 'file': a diary he kept as a young man. The experience of reading it years later is shocking: How can two such alien, such opposite beings have the same handwriting? What common essence is it that makes a single person of him and this little snot?
For twenty years [Odysseus] had thought about nothing but his return. But once he was back, he was amazed to realize that his life, the very essence of his life, its center, its treasure, lay outside Ithaca, in the twenty years of his wanderings. And this treasure he had lost, and could retrieve only by telling about it.
· The Book of Leaving and Forgetting [Denverpost]
· Czech mate [Bookmagazine]
· Moral hierarchy of emotions [Review of Books]
· One Night Stand With Exile [Centralbooking]
