Irena, who has lived in France since Soviet forces crushed the Prague Spring of 1968, and Josef, who briefly met her before he emigrated to Denmark, experience what their Western friends bill as the “great return” to their homeland. The reader knows from Kundera’s tone that it will be more disappointing than great, more disorienting than satisfying. In their parallel stories that intersect only at the end, Kundera captures every detail and emotion, making even the most sedentary reader see the world through emigre eyes.
There’s the disconnect with people who have led different lives for so long that they have no interest in what happened to you, who want only to see if you remember the same things from the time before you left. There’s also the jarring change in the music of the language. “Josef was listening to an unknown language whose every word he understood,” Kundera writes. His language in this slim but elegant volume is nothing short of masterful.
