Ignorance by Milan Kundera, trans. Linda Asher

Milan Kundera's gift has been to mingle politics with an exploration of subjectivity, and the result has been thin, light-textured novels driven by appetite and disappointment. The modern novel in his hands is a sexy, anorexic, cynical thing. When Kundera was still a Czech writer, newly emigrated to France (in 1969), subjectivity, or how we fix our identity, was a fine weapon. Dominating his fiction, it ridiculed Communist proclamations of alleged good news about humanity. The brotherhood of the working man, the wisdom of the Party, but also the bribes, the lies, the coercion, the deliberate forgetfulness – those verbal façades and practical tricks were, like the texture of Kundera's prose, a kind of grating on the window.

Individuals peered out and chose a survival route for the moments they would venture outside. His subjects wandered out to take lovers, but their eroticism was enough for a network of personal and state politics, laughter and forgetting, to touch them.

Ignorance sees Kundera tackling a humanly richer theme than in his last few books. Two exiles, Irena and Josef, respectively settled in Paris and Copenhagen, return to post-Communist Prague to rediscover their old lives. It isn't easy: 20 years of political isolation and emotional absence mean no one really counts them among the living. Josef, who when he fled told his brother and sister-in-law to take what they liked from his flat, finds his brother wearing his old wristwatch.

Nothing is said; nothing returned. Josef cannot pick up a past or claim a future. He tries re-reading an adolescent diary but the obscure memory of his first love affair punishes him. Irena has a chance encounter with Josef at the airport, which gives her new hope: she remembers having met him in her Czech past. But he has no idea who she is. Her future, if it exists, is in France, where after her Czech husband died she brought up children alone.

The remaining characters exist more for symmetry than plot. The Swede Gustaf, Irena's no longer passionate lover, unlike the exiles relishes the "open" Prague of expensive restaurants and tortured English. His escape from himself sees him in bed with Irena's young-looking mother. Meanwhile Milada, victim of Josef as a schoolboy lover, lives alone. Milada is not so sure everything about Communism was bad.

Contrast her with "N", Josef's friend and one-time ardent ideologue. As evasive as ever, "N" won't condemn global capitalism. Irena, however, calls one of its effects that ubiquitous sewage-water music which won't allow even love and death to happen in peace.

Oddly, the themes of this novel are much sadder to retell than to apprehend from Kundera's words. I wonder whether this rare modern novelist who still treats characters as puppets, and writes in a simplified, self-aware third person, really likes people. Stripping their psyches down to an out-of-control mixture of now useful, now painful forgetting, he is like someone hating Freud because he thinks Freud has reduced humankind to something merely mechanical. But then, by way of a perverse tribute, he turns himself accomplice.

This "novel" is really an essay on the idea of return. Psychoanalysis hovers, because it is memory's return to childhood, though Kundera wants us to see the return in different terms. His title comes via a multi-lingual tour of words for nostalgia, whose derivations show a fascination with what was once known, and cannot he known. But the best parallel for his characters' return to Prague is Odysseus, back from Ithaca after 20 years. Did Odysseus love Penelope after so long? She was forced to be faithful; how did she really see him?

A satisfying novel would give us fleshed-out answers, and it would satisfy because of and despite the fact that memory is "fiction". But I suspect that is Kundera's problem. Not believing in memory makes him not believe in artistic fiction. Its potential music has become sewage, nothingness, din. The Kundera who crops up here and there in this text is a Franco-Czech Proust sans everything. The search for lost time has no good effect. It is, as he imagines it must be for Irena, as if a poet were "writing his greatest poem with ink that instantly disappears".

Lesley Chamberlain's novel 'Girl in a Garden' will be published in March