This is a really enjoyable book and feels like a return to form for Kundera. To be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss. In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. Arguably, the rest of the text is an extended mediation on the meaning of this concept, the suffering of the exile, and the bewilderment of return.
It was in that the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia and suppressed of the Prague Spring, but only in that they imposed their new government which proceeded to implement its harsh crackdown on all liberals and dissidents.
So it was 20 years later that Russian communism collapsed and the Russia-backed Czech communist government fell. And Odysseus was away from his homeland Ithaca for a long 20 years: 10 years fighting at Troy, three wandering across the Mediterranean and having the extraordinary adventures all children learn about; then seven trapped by the magician Calypso, who was also his lover.
Now these disparate elements β geopolitics, personal stories, etymological precision and ancient myth β could easily have hung apart and pulled in different directions. In my opinion his use of these kinds of disparate elements, or different levels, failed to gel in the previous couple of novels.
But here they meld perfectly. All four of these levels or themes naturally complement each other. To both of them Kundera applies his insights about memory and forgetting, namely the idea developed in Identity that part of the point of friendship it to tell each other stories about the old days and keep memories alive. Exiled to a foreign land, with no friends, those memories atrophy and die. But people who do not spend time with their compatriots, like Irena or Odysseus, are inevitably stricken with amnesia.
