{"product_id":"9780060002107","title":"Ignorance","description":"\u003cp\u003eA man and a woman meet by chance while returning to their homeland, which they had abandoned twenty years earlier when they chose 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMilan 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAuthor Biography: \u003cfont face=\"arial\"\u003eThe Franco-Czech novelist Milan Kundera was born in Brno and has lived in France, his second homeland, for more than twenty years. \u003cp\u003eHe is the author of the novels \u003ci\u003eThe Joke, Life Is Elsewhere, The Farewell Party, The Books of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, \u003c\/i\u003eand\u003ci\u003e Immortality,\u003c\/i\u003e and the short story collection \u003ci\u003eLaughable Loves\u003c\/i\u003e—all originally written in Czech. \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLike \u003ci\u003eSlowness,\u003c\/i\u003e his two earlier nonfiction works, \u003ci\u003eThe Art ofthe Novel\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eTestaments Betrayed,\u003c\/i\u003e were originally written in French.  \u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"HarperCollins Publishers","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47056904225008,"sku":"9780060002107","price":13.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780060002107_p0.jpg?v=1763619816","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780060002107","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}