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A man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier when they had chosen 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. Then again, what can we expect of our weak memory? It records only "an insignificant, minuscule particle" of the past, "and no one knows why it's this bit and not any other bit." We live our lives sunk in a vast forgetting, a fact we refuse to recognize. Only those who return after twenty years, like Odysseus returning to his native Ithaca, can be dazzled and astounded by observing the goddess of ignorance firsthand.
Milan Kundera is the only author today who can take such dizzying concepts as absence, memory, forgetting, and ignorance, and transform them into material for a novel, masterfully orchestrating them into a polyphonic and moving work.
Author Biography: The Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, for more than twenty years.
He is the author of the novels The Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, The Farewell Party, The Books of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Immortality, and the short story collection Laughable Loves, all originally written in Czech.
Like Slowness, his two earlier nonfiction works, The Art ofthe Novel and Testaments Betrayed, were originally written in French.
195 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2000
"Both of them are pidgeonholed, labeled, and they will be judged by how true they are to their labels (of course, that and that alone is what's emphatically called "being true to oneself")."There's something about his books that makes them feel like narrative sketches, filled with author's musings in long, heavily punctuated sentences; ruminations about particular world experiences that finally, tangentially connect to the characters - and the characters themselves serving as just a canvas for Kundera's introspective reflections.
"They had really done a lot for me. They saw me as the embodiment of an émigré's suffering. Then the time came for me to confirm that suffering by my joyous return to the homeland. And that confirmation didn't happen. They felt duped. And so did 'i, because up till then I'd thought they loved me not for my suffering but for my self."
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"She had always taken it as a given that emigrating was a misfortune. But, now she wonders, wasn't it instead an illusion of misfortune, an illusion suggested by the way people perceive an émigré?"The motif Kundera relies on is the story of Odysseus, of his single-minded journey back to where he was from, to Ithaca, to his old life, where he - supposedly - belonged, where he was one of them, where his life outside of the boundaries of the island was little but an interruption in the regular chain of events. But what about the two decades of his life he spent elsewhere? Do they matter? And how is he supposed to reconcile them with the life to which he made his "great return"?
"For twenty years he [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 talking about it. [...] But in Ithaca he was not a stranger, he was one of their own, so it never occurred to anyone to say, "Tell us!"
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"It was a very strange conversation: I'd forgotten who they had been; they weren't interested in who I'd become. Can you believe that not one person here has ever asked me a single question about my life abroad? Not one single question! Never! I keep having the sense that they want to amputate twenty years of my life from me. Really, it does feel like an amputation. I feel shortened, diminished, like a dwarf."
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"I imagine the feelings of two people meeting again after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think they are linked by the same experience, the same recollections. The same recollections? That's where the misunderstanding starts: they don't have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections are not similar; they don't intersect' and even in terms of quantity they are not comparable: one person remembers the other more than he is remembered; first because memory capacity varies among individuals (an explanation that each of them would at least find acceptable), but also (and this is more painful to admit) because they don't hold the same importance for each other."Kundera's writing still has the magic in its wistful philosophizing, exploration of nostalgia and memory, and I highly recommend this book. It leaves behind a vague feeling of dissatisfaction - not the irritated one of something not living up to the expectations, but the disappointment and dissatisfaction in the very expectations you hold, and somehow I find this feeling resonating and captivating.
الغريب عندما يتخذ قرار الغربة. و أيا كانت أسبابه فقد حكم على نفسه بالغربة الأبدية حتى و إن عاد.
ذهبت من هناك و هي ما تزال فتاة بريئة و تعود الان و قد صارت امرأة ناضجة و خلفها حياة. حياة صعبة تشعر بالافتخار بها. تريد أن تفعل أي شيء كي يقبلنها بتجاربها التي عاشتها في السنوات الأخيرة. بقناعاتها. و أفكارها. هي مسألة: خذوها أو اتركوها. إما أن تتمكن من البقاء معهن كما هي الأن أو أنها لن تبقى.
العالم كله يعتقد أننا نرحل للتمتع بحياة سهلة. لا يعرفون كم من الصعب أن تشقي طريقك في عالم غريب. ألا تلاحظين؟ تغادرين بلدك و معك طفل في المهد و آخر في البطن. تفقدين زوجك. تربين ابنتيك في البؤس..في الغربة يتغير كل شيء حتى أن الشخص العائد ليس هو نفسه الشخص الذي ذهب منذ سنوات أو عقود و عندما يعود و يجد ما كان له قد أصبح لغيره فهو لا يحمل ضغينة بقدر ما يحمل ألما و مرارة و يحسب أنه يشاهد الدنيا من مقعد المتفرج لا من خشبة المسرح الذي كان يقوم بدور البطولة عليها من قبل.
مع ذلك فإن رؤيته لساعته في معصم آخر غار به في حالة من القلق عميقة. تولد عنده انطباع بأنه يلتقي بالعالم كما يلتقي به ميت يخرج بعد عشرين عاما من قبره. يلامس الأرض بخطو من فقد عادة المشي. لا يكاد يتعرف على العالم الذي عاش فيه. لكنه يتعثر باستمرار ببقايا حياته. يرى بنطلونه. ربطة عنقه. على أجساد الباقين أحياء. الذين توزعوها بكل طبيعية. يرى كل شيء و لا يطالب بشيء. فالموتى عادة ما يكونون خجولين.مع ذلك فإن الغريب ينتابه الحنين كل حين و لكن الصوت يكون أعلى في البداية ثم لا يلبث أن يخفت رويدا رويدا حتى لا يُسمع إلا همسا و مع ذلك فإنه يظل في الوجدان و تبقى الذكريات حية نابضة حتى ان تداخلت صورها و تباعدت تفاصيلها.
كلما كان الزمن الذي نخلفه وراءنا أكبر كلما أصبح الصوت الذي يحثنا على العودة لا يقاوم. يبدو هذا الحكم مبدءا عاما. لكنه مزيف. فالكائن البشري يشيخ و النهاية تقترب. فتصبح كل لحظة ثمينة. و لا يعود هناك وقت نضيعه على الذكريات. يجب فهم التناقض الرياضي الظاهري للحنين. يظهر هذا بقوة أكبر في مرحلة الشباب الأولى. حين يكون حجم الحياة الماضية زهيدا.من هنا كانت العودة للوطن بعد طول الغياب هي غربة ثانية و أبدية و لكنها هذه المرة داخل الوطن نفسه.
مراهقة من أسرة فقيرة. تعشق فتى من أسرة غنية. و الفتاة التي تبحث في الشيوعية عن معنى لحياتها. تتحول بعد العام 1968 إلى امرأة تتزوج من منشق و تكتشف معه فجأة عالما أكثر رحابة. فهي لا تتعرف فقط على شيوعيين تمردوا على الحزب. بل على رهبان و سجناء سياسيين قدماء و برجوازيين كبار فقدوا طبقتهم أيضا. ثم و في العام 1989 تعود. كما لو أنها خارجة من حلم. لتصبح ما كانت عليه. ابنة أسرة فقيرة ناجحة.هل تريد قصة. هذا هو ملخص القصة و لكننا لا نقرأ القصص هنا بل نقرأ كونديرا نفسه كما تعودنا في باقي رواياته
"The more vast the amount of time we've left behind us, the more irresistible is the voice calling us to return to it."In this poignant recount of two people, forced to bid goodbye to their native country, in the diminished, yet flickering hope of finding a brighter tomorrow in an alien land, almost 20 years ago from the present, unravels a story replete with more questions than answers. Irena and Josef have found comfortable refuge in their respective abodes at Paris and Copenhagen and have led a fairly decent life, battling through tags of émigrés and periods of insuperable doubts. Irena has outlived her husband, Martin, reared her two daughters dutifully and seems comfortably living her life with her partner, Gustaf , many years her senior. Josef, after leading a few years of blissful matrimony with his Danish wife, had to surrender her to death which clutched the hands of a severe disease to bring down the curtains.
“during his absence, an invisible broom had swept across the landscape of his childhood, wiping away everything familiar; the encounter he had expected never took place.”Irena, on her part, falls into the very trap she had tried so valiantly to flee twenty years ago; her garrulous mother’s circle of influence. She thinks she can escape her tyranny by escaping the brick house but the roads too seem mercilessly hostile. She wears a local dress, she finds in a city shop, to look (and feel) one of them but when she looks herself in the mirror, the dress itself seemed to have disowned her, accusing her of a traitor who could not live through the pain of this country; a coward who did not have the courage to bear her individual struggle in the interest of her nation.
“She makes love wildly, lasciviously, and at the same time the curtain of oblivion wraps her lewdnesses in an all-concealing darkness. As if a poet were writing his greatest poem with ink that instantly disappears.”