You Can Go Home Again.(Ignorance)(Book Review)

Emigre life contains certain constants. The nightmare that your plane is diverted and lands at an airport in your home country, where uniformed men are waiting with guns drawn. The nostalgic daydreams about a scenic landscape or a lovely path in the woods from your previous life. The obsessive preoccupation with memory, made all the more intense by the knowledge that there's no going back, that the country where you spent your youth is closed to you forever. But what happens when this turns out to have been a wrong assumption, when, as in 1989, totalitarian regimes crumble and suddenly emigres are free to go home? That's the starting point of Milan Kundera's latest novel, "Ignorance" (195 pages. HarperCollins), which proves that, after getting deservedly lukewarm responses to previous offerings like "Immortality" and "Slowness," the Paris-based Czech writer is back at the top of his game.

Irena, who has lived in France since Soviet forces crushed the Prague Spring of 1968, and Josef, who briefly met her before he immigrated to Denmark, embark on separate visits to their homeland. Sylvie, Irena's French friend, insists that this will be "your great return." But the reader knows from Kundera's tone that the return will be more disappointing than great, more disorienting than satisfying. In the parallel stories of Irena and Josef--which intersect only at the end-- he illuminates every detail and every emotion. His greatest accomplishment is to make even the most sedentary reader see the world through emigre eyes.