Customer Reviews

The Visible World

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Wow. I heard this book discussed on NPR's Weekend All Things Considered, and decided it sounded worth the price.
I was not disappointed. As a fan of Milan Kundera, I resist reading books compared to his, but this time it is spot-on. Slouka's protagonist weaves an imagined love story between his mother and a WWII resistance fighter in with the story of his own youth spent with Czech expatriates and his trips to Prague searching for answers to the mystery of his mother's life. The result is a wonderful combination of magical realism and stunning, clear prose that had me hanging on every word. I think Mark Slouka is a marvelous writer, and I hope many more find this lovely novel. Here's the NPR link-

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10161668

I thought this book might give me some interesting background on Prague, but it far surpassed my expectations. It is a beautifully constructed triptych that interweaves fiction, memoir, and historical fact. The writing is beautiful, the characters memorable, the descriptions evocative.

I was totally intrigued by Slouka's previous novel, "God's Fool," and awaited with great anticipation the advent of this his latest novel. I was not disappointed. The work centers around the musing of a maturing American male who seeks to reconcile a mystery involving his parents wgich took place during the brutal Nazis occupation of Czechoslovokia. The answers he finds are far less evident than the book's title would suggest.

This is one of the few books I could truly enjoy reading twice!

For those of you who, like me, are interested both in memoir and the history of Central Europe, Mark Slouka's The Visible World is provocative reading. The son of Czechs who settled in New York City after the Communist putsch of 1948, Slouka is a writer who is as possessed by his parents' past as some of the most history-obssessed offspring of Holocaust survivors like myself. His book is poised somewhere between memoir and autobiographical fiction. Apart from his parents, Slouka is fascinated by the heroes of the Czech resistance during world war. Although the movie Casablanca has Humphrey Bogart sending Ingrid Bergman off on a plane with a leader of the Czech resistance, many people have forgotten that Czechs were once regarded as a symbol of resistance against the Nazis. Slouka takes us on his personal quest into that territory.

This is a captivating tale of desperation built upon carefully constructed, mesmerizing prose. The Heydrich assassination in 1942 Prague provides the background for the story of a son's investigation of his mother's lost happiness. There is a Strindberg-like deterministic quality to all of the characters as they play out their roles, yet the author still manages to surprise. The writing is extremely evocative yet not so dense as to impede the action. This is a really fine piece of work.

"The visible World" reminds one of Andre Makine's "The Woman who waited".Both Makine and Slouka have written movingly about 'love beyond all song and arguement'-( as Slouka puts it here)- Andre on love wasted in waiting for the return of the beloved and Slouka on love lost in the tortured self-sacrifice by the beloved. Both are painters with words- Slouka being more Impressionistic. His depiction of the love of Bem and Ivana- in the damp pine-strewn forest, in the hunter's cabin or in the pool holding each other, 'like a statue of lovers half-drowned by tide', is a joy to read, sit back and visualize.
The main story revolves around the assasination of the hated Heydrich by Czech patriots. It led to severe reprisals in which several innocent Czech citizens were massacred by the Nazis. One village, Lidce, was totally destroyed. So much so, as one of the characters in the story says, the partisans thought of turning themselves in to stay the arrests, interrogations and executions. The partisans were later betrayed by one Curda and killed by the Nazis. In the story, Bem, one of the partisans, is away with Ivana making love to her in a cemetery when the others are massacred by the Nazis. Thus Bem escapes death at the hands of the Germans but he is tortured by the thought that his companions might heve gone to their death thinking that, absent as he was, he it was who had betrayed them, Because of this festering thought Bem leaves Ivana and shoots himself.Thus we have a contrast of love and life on one side and doubt and death on the other. Slouka could have illuminated these contrasting situations in greater detail,but he has not. But even the disjointed contrast he has presented is impressive.
The father of the narrator, as portrayed by Slouka, deserves our salute. Here we have a man dumped by Ivana, yet stead-fast in his love for her. He welcomes her 'ready to shoulder the burden of his love' when Bem is no more.He gives her a new life despite her mixed feelings for him. One cannot be more generous.
The assasination of Heydrich led to an awful masaacre of the innocents. And now we have a wonderful love story. Perhaps, the sacrifice made by the assasisns was after all worthwhile.

This is not a book that you can just read a few pages of in the car, a few more whilst waiting for your appointment. Not that it's terribly confusing, but rather, the narrator talks to you directly and you feel like you just need to sit down and listen. Some books are like that.

It was hard getting into it at first, but once you get past the first part, you're hooked.

The books is divided into three parts: the first is where the narrator talks about his childhood in the States. The second part is the narrator's journey to Parague to discover anything he can about his parents' past. The third and most moving part is his view on what really happened in his parents' youth, his attempt to fill the gaps of his family history.

WWII as the backdrop for the last chunk of this book, you feel like you are there with them. The style is inviting and when you finish the book you'll almost believe that it did happen.

Another winner by Slouka, this novel reads like an echoing dream and tribute to an imagined love story in war-time Prague. Slouka's turns of phrases and cadences are deeply evocative, as telling in his silences and omissions as in what he expresses. Set in Prague during WWII, his rendering of the city, street life and surrounding countryside brings them atmospherically to life against the storyline and characters. As in the title of the novel, his prose plumbs the depths of what lies richly unseen and invisible in the lives of characters as seen through the nostalgia and memories of his protagonist. Slouka taps a melancholic vein that brings to mind Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, albeit with less of the incipient yearning of heart's desire and more of the soul's seeking to fill a space that memory and love left behind.

What if we were borne back ceaselessly, not into our American navels, but into the story of the Czech resistance and into the question of what is larger and more important than our own individual lives? This novel is a kind of meditation on living with the past and, as a second-generation immigrant, going out in search of what came before America. The story is mentioned in other reviews (and I would definitely recommend that you listen to the NPR interview listed in an earlier review), so I won't go into details here but just say that the mix of memoir, where the narrator describes what he observes of his parents in America, then the intermezzo, where he goes searching for glimpses of them in Prague, and then the final part where he reimagines the story of his mother's life and her lost love, has a kind of quiet magic. The part where he says that Prague was right beneath the ground in Queens and upstate New York makes sense of the immigrant experience in a particularly poetic way.

This isn't a book that I found myself drawn to immediately, or even that I liked for the first few dozen pages. It drew me in, though, as it touched nerves associated with memories of my past and of my parents, some good, others not so happy.

Slouka tells the story with the pain and hollowness that comes from the drive to seek out the truth of the past that some parts or one's judgment often counsel against. I liken the experience of reading this book to one of solitary reflection that one experiences on a bitter winter day sitting alone on a park bench. Though there are turns of humor, there are also wrenching shocks.

The narrative is told deftly weaving facts, imagination, and memories- which often have elements of both- telling of a son's quest to understand his parents. What made this story ultimately compelling- and satisfying- for me is that it is so deeply personal and universal. Don't we all, at some point, want to understand where we, and, by extension, our parents, come from? Why did they do what they did? What were their dreams? Their failures? The answers to these questions that the protagonist asks of his parents resonated with me and made this book come alive.

It is a satisfying read, if not light. It made me work to understand, not in a way that was teasing or cloying, but sophisticated. What I can commend most of this book is that, though I read it months ago, it is with me still, as if I had just put it down.