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The Visible World

3.44 of 5 stars 3.44 · rating details · 444 ratings · 99 reviews

The Visible World is an evocative, powerfully romantic novel about a son's attempt to understand his mother's past, a search that leads him to a tragic love affair and the heroic story of the assassination of a high-ranking Nazi by the Czech resistance.
The narrator of The Visible World, the American-born son of Czech immigrants living in New York, grows up in an atmospher...more

Hardcover, 256 pages

Published April 19th 2007 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (first published 2007)

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Aug 29, 2008 Anna rated it 4 of 5 stars

While I was reading this book, I couldn't say I liked it or not. It was like collecting little crocks together to gain the final picture. During reading, I was also confused by some facts of German occupation - I haven't lived through any occupation of our country (the Czech Republic) so I didn't catch some circumstance even if I was supposed so. But after all, after closing the book for the last time, I realised that all the pictures of characters' life made one huge picture of this book and I...more

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Nov 19, 2012 Chrissie rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Chrissie by: Daisy

Shelves: czech-republic, hf, relationships, text-checked

This novel is split into three different sections: ""The New World", "Prague Intermezzo" and finally "1942: A Novel". The book's narrator is the son of Czechoslovakian parents. He is seeking to understand and to make sense of the events of his childhood and the estrangement he felt between his mother and father. The first part is set in the US, in Queens, where the boy grew up. This part is written as a memoir. The reader sees the parents' relationship through the eyes of the child. It concludes...more This novel is split into three different sections: ""The New World", "Prague Intermezzo" and finally "1942: A Novel". The book's narrator is the son of Czechoslovakian parents. He is seeking to understand and to make sense of the events of his childhood and the estrangement he felt between his mother and father. The first part is set in the US, in Queens, where the boy grew up. This part is written as a memoir. The reader sees the parents' relationship through the eyes of the child. It concludes in 1984 when his mother leaves the house, walks to the bus stop and there steps in front of the 4:38 bus to Allentown. This entire section is dry and hard to get involved in.

The second section is short and relates the historical events concerning the assassination of Reichprotektor Reinhard Heydrich in Prague May, 1942, by Czech partisans. Why? The boy's mother never could forget the love she felt for one of these partisans. The young man now goes back to Prague seeking information about his mother and her relationship with that partisan, Tomás Bém, the love of her life, the man she could never forget. The son sought to understand why she took her own life. He returned home empty handed, not much wiser than when he went.

The third section is a novel, an attempt to imagine what could explain his mother's feelings and subsequent actions.

My problem is that I never felt the love between the mother and Tomás. The mother marries another man and it is the child of this marriage that is the narrator of the book. The reader should at least feel the father's love for this woman. I did not feel it! It felt merely as a marriage of convenience. This is a book about two love relationships, and yet neither of them felt genuine. I cannot be engaged in Mark Slouka's characters since I do not feel the love that supposedly motivates the actions of the characters! It is that simple.

I am currently listening to The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. On the back cover of The Visible World the author's writing is compared to Ondaatje's. Well, I beg to differ. They are in no way similar. I hate it when one sells a book by comparing its author to another that is renown. (less)

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Dec 16, 2011 Deborah Gray rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a difficult book to get into, but well worth the effort. The weaving of memoir, history and novel is artfully and successfully done, in my opinion, so that you are equally drawn to each, although I found the imagined love story and the real assasination account to be more compelling than the true story on which the book was based. Perhaps it is the attempt of the author to fill in the gaps for himself of his difficult childhood, or perhaps his existence with his psychologically damaged m...more

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Nov 03, 2011 Julia rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: literature-fiction

This book has unsettled me, and I'm still mulling over why. Slouka, a professor of creative writing (Univ. of Chicago, then Columbia) places me under a waterfall of some of the most descriptive sentences I've ever read--so much so, that at times the sheer VOLUME of detail becomes overwhelming.

The book is divided into three sections: "The New World: A Memoir", "Prague: Intermezzo", and finally "1942: A Novel." Slouka, himself of Czech heritage, has built his book around the true story of the assa...more This book has unsettled me, and I'm still mulling over why. Slouka, a professor of creative writing (Univ. of Chicago, then Columbia) places me under a waterfall of some of the most descriptive sentences I've ever read--so much so, that at times the sheer VOLUME of detail becomes overwhelming.

The book is divided into three sections: "The New World: A Memoir", "Prague: Intermezzo", and finally "1942: A Novel." Slouka, himself of Czech heritage, has built his book around the true story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. The book unfolds like a mystery novel, dropping hints as to the connection of the main character's family to that event.

"The New World" section, set in America after WWII, shows a boy struggling to understand his parents, but never being able to grasp who they really are. He is vaguely aware that his mother had loved another man, who had been lost in the war. The depth of her despair is finally revealed at the end of this section, when she steps in front of a bus in 1984.

"Prague" is the section dealing with the grown boy's attempt to return to the city, searching everywhere for those who might have remembered his mother--but finding only more bits and pieces that he cannot connect into a coherent shape.

And so we come to "1942: A Novel", where the grown man writes the fictional love story of his mother and the invisible man that haunted her. While this section is overly sentimental at times, Slouka's writing style continues to weave its magic.

The part I want to share is the 5th short chapter from the second section, and hopefully you can see why Slouka's writing style has struck me and will stay with me for a long time:

"They had been here, all of them, and now they were gone. What could match the wonder of that? They'd leaned against a sun-warmed wall on a particular afternoon in June, scratched their noses with the backs of their wrists, pulled an over-soft apricot in half with their fingers. And now they were gone. I'd come to love the two of them; their voices, should I somehow hear them again in this world, would be more familiar to me than my own. But others had known them. I never had, really.
Someone once said that at the end of every life is a full stop, and death could care less if the piece is a fragment. It is up to us, the living, to supply a shape where none exists, to rescue from the flood even those we never knew. Like beggars, we must patch the universe as best we can."

This book has called up my own family, and made me aware of how little I know of them--and now have no way of learning more. My great-grandmother lived 99 years, and I have only three memories of her. Slouka dedicates this book to his parents and to the seven who assassinated Heydrich, only to be killed in their hideout--and now those millions who were lost to WWII have become faded photographs, just as we all will be 100 years from now.

So time becomes this great dark river, and we vainly try to throw nets across it to capture some memories before they are gone--and we never can. The past that haunts the protagonist of this book haunts us all--the "if onlys" and "what ifs".

(less)

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Mar 13, 2013 Joan rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is a beautifully written book which helps the reader grasp the tragedy of war and the fact that people have to live with the events forever. The narrators mother has a story which is part of her very make up and throughout his childhood he is aware she loved a man in the war but doesn't know the story and cannot get information from his parents.

In the third part of the book we get to find out what happened in Prague and Czech Republic all those years ago. The love affair is touching and be...more

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May 26, 2010 Em rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorite

If you have loved someone and lost that person, then Mark Slouka‘s The Visible World is for you.

If you are loving a person you have not seen for decades, then this book is for you.

If you have been captured by love in spite of heartaches, and cannot forget, then this book is for you.

If you love America and Europe, then this book is for you.

If you love history, and literature, then this book is definitely for you.

The Visible World begins with a memoir and ends with a novel, craftily connected by a...more

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Apr 04, 2007 amanda rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: lovelovelove, fiction

Possibly my new favoritest book ever!
I'm just not the ind of girl who can call a book a masterpiece. i just can't!
so what do i say? Mark Slouka's novel of an American-born man longing to piece together the fragmented history of his Czech parents is positively breathtaking. (Am I the kind of girl who says breathtaking?) Equal parts suspenseful World War II saga, family memoir, and extraordinary romance, The Visible World is a wonderful read!

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Aug 02, 2011 Jo added it · review of another edition

This is a novel partly about the power of stories in our personal and national identities and histories. The narrator tells his story and that of his Czech parents from a comntemporary vantage point in America and Prague. At the heart of the novel is a tragedy in a church crypt in 1942 and a painfully beautiful love story. I found it incredibly moving. Epic in scale, the beauty is in the detail. Reviewers on the backcover blurb make comparisons to The English Patient - but this is an easier read...more

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Aug 25, 2008 Brian rated it 5 of 5 stars

Beautifully written in luminous prose and built upon acute psychological observation, this is the story of a woman whose life is first illuminated and then blighted by her involvement with the Czech resistance during the second world war. It's told from the point of view of her son who slowly unearths his mother's hidden past in an effort to understand the suffocating sadness that surrounded her life. A masterpiece.

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Sep 23, 2011 Sage rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

OK by read it I mean skim a third of it and skip ahead to get to the relevant details. It's a shame because the subject matter and setting is facinating; I don't claim to know anything of Czech culture/history. The plot holding it together just did not work for me at all. I found it overburdened with metaphors and smilies. As if the writer is trying to be too clever. It would have been smarter to use simpler language and it actually *make sense* but never mind. Then underneath all that tricksy t...more

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Sep 01, 2007 Tami rated it 5 of 5 stars

The book starts out a tough read. The first third is told from the narrator's perspective, he's the son in the story. But then he tells the last two thirds of the book from his parents' perspectives, and it's a love story combined with a tale of WWII intrigue and tragedy. It's totally worth slogging through the first part to get to the really good story because it's so fantastic.

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Mar 03, 2009 Erica rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, historical, men-authors, bookshelf-books, favorites, czech

Within the first 12 pages of this book, I thought to myself, "I never want this book to end." And throughout the novel I grappled with that idea--I didn't want it to end, but I knew that I would not be able to withstand the emotional power and grief that Slouka packs into every page. Experiencing the War almost in real-time, from the perspective of someone living in Eastern Europe, enthralled the historian in me and prompted me to reassess how I conceptualize that period of history, to critique...more

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Dec 20, 2007 Kelcey rated it 4 of 5 stars

The first section of this book is called a memoir and it feels a bit slow and self-indulgent in the way memoirs can be, but the last section is absolutely beautiful and makes me want to re-read the first part to see how the narratives bounce back and forth and enhance one another. Though the pace of the book is slow (in a lovely, thoughtful way), it can be read quickly.

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Oct 11, 2011 Marianne rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011reads, family, friendship, europe, love, war, memoir

I can see what the author was trying to do with this book, and perhaps if I had read it at a different time, or was in a different mood, or re-read it again, I would get it more than I did on this reading. The book is split into three parts (as a child, as a man, a novelisation), with the author telling the story of his mother and her great love affair with a man who wasn't his father, and how that caused her all the issues he was aware of while growing up.

The first part of the book just takes...more

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Dec 07, 2008 Debbie rated it 4 of 5 stars

This novel gets four stars for the sheer beauty of the prose. I've never read a book, pencil in hand, softly underlining the most beautiful of sentences - but with this one, I couldn't help myself.

"Winter. It was as if the year would never die".

"There are people like that, after all - individuals who resist the current, who hold out against the betrayal. Who refuse to take their small bouquet of misremembered moments and leave. You'll run into them at the deli counter, or while waiting in line a...more

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Aug 19, 2007 Barbara rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: myfavorites

This is a superb book. Oprah magazine recommended it, and I got it just because it was about Prague and we are planning a trip to Prague. This book offered me so much more than information about Prague. It is part memoir, part fiction, part history. It is beautifully written and interestingly structured. I highly recommend it.

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May 22, 2008 Michelle rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Pretty moving. First generation American son to Czech parents involved in the Resistance goes back to Czech Republic to unearth their story. The second part of the book, which takes place in Czech in 1942-on, feels immediate enough to make your stomach turn over in places. Felt kind of unrelentingly sad.

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May 19, 2009 lara rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: People who like romances, and a little bit of European History

I picked up The Visible World not expecting much, a found one of my all-time favourite novels in it.

The book flits between modern America and Czechoslovakia around the time of war, following the romance of the narrator's parents. Although the way Slouka writes is quite sharp and engaging, it feels a little broken up at first, and like it's not really going anywhere. But it is definitely 100% worth sticking with, as in the last third of the book it all comes and fits together in a really moving e...more

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Mar 03, 2009 Kay rated it 5 of 5 stars

There are those who say 'good books' must be difficult to read. In general I don't agree with that, but in this case, this book is both good, in several senses, and difficult to read, in several senses.

The difficult part is both structural and moral - the first third of the book is written as a memoir: the son of a woman who is clearly emotionally troubled and distant from her husband and child begins to explore her past in the hope of discovering what has caused her to behave so painfully. His...more There are those who say 'good books' must be difficult to read. In general I don't agree with that, but in this case, this book is both good, in several senses, and difficult to read, in several senses.

The difficult part is both structural and moral - the first third of the book is written as a memoir: the son of a woman who is clearly emotionally troubled and distant from her husband and child begins to explore her past in the hope of discovering what has caused her to behave so painfully. His discovery is of a love affair, back in the Second World War, in Prague and its terrible, beautiful, tormented progress and eventual disastrous conclusion makes up the other two thirds of the book.

This makes the book uneven. The first part is strongly disassociated and both nostalgic and diffident, the rest is immediate and powerfully emotional. The child, grown to a man, is a little pathetic and often uninteresting to the reader, while the mother and her lover are strongly delineated and morally acute. Sometimes, reading the second section with the first in mind, it's like having one shoe on and one foot bare, it just feels very odd.

But the good parts of this book more than repay the effort the reader makes. The issues involved: maternal love versus the love of equals, the morality of wartime, the passion that people can feel when their lives are under threat, the several forms of acute courage displayed by various characters, the evocation of Prague ... all these are masterly but never bravura. The tone of the book is gentle, and this gentle and quiet pace allows an accretion of tension that is so subtle that you don't realise you're feeling it until you stop reading for a moment and feel how tightly you're holding the pages and know that you have to keep reading to find out what happens.

And what happens is truly heartbreaking. What Slouka achieves with this constrained pace and palate is an overwhelming sense of inevitability that carries you through the end of the novel with absolute certainty that you've never read a better love story, or a greater tragedy.(less)

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Jun 24, 2012 Ian rated it 2 of 5 stars

Very disappointing.
Admittedly, I only read read it because of it's Prague setting, though.
It's very disjointed, flitting back and forward between different times and locations, and seemingly random, unassociated stories and characters.
The book is writtena s if it's a non-fiction memoir (which I don't think it is) - seemignly random stories are told without advincing the plot, making it (for me) a very difficult book to stick with.
Anyone without a prior knowledge of the events surrounding the ass...more

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Jun 30, 2010 Oliver rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: czech-republic, americana

Slouka's novel is about a romance between a participant in the Heydrich assassination in occupied Czechoslovakia and the mother of the narrator. The narrator begins his tale though memories of an American childhood and the cracks in his parents relationship, and for a while it's a sort of mystery so you keep turning the pages. Slouka can definitely write a bit so I don't think it's a bad book - but it's not a great book either. His metaphors and similes never quite gel together that well; the Am...more

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Jan 23, 2011 Linda Hopf rated it 4 of 5 stars

I almost put the book aside during the first part of the story. He is a child - they lived here, these friends visited his parents, his mother seemed sad. Then they moved again - repeat the above list. Then they rented a cabin by the lake with their friends, they planted flowers and so on. Granted, it was beautifully written. You could really picture/smell/feel the places but it seemed pointless. Then he is all grown up and in Czechoslovakia searching into his parents past. You start to glimpse...more

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Apr 04, 2010 Amalia rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: rozreads

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Under any other circumstance, I suspect this could have been a 4 star book. The trouble was that I finished Cutting for Stone the day before I read this, and my book prior to that was The Help. Also, the two other WW II books that I've read in the last 6 months have been The Book Thief and Sarah's Key. Clearly, there were some precendents here that disadvantaged The Visible World. Given the option, I would give it 3.5 stars.

I actually struggled with maintaining interest in the first section of t...more Under any other circumstance, I suspect this could have been a 4 star book. The trouble was that I finished Cutting for Stone the day before I read this, and my book prior to that was The Help. Also, the two other WW II books that I've read in the last 6 months have been The Book Thief and Sarah's Key. Clearly, there were some precendents here that disadvantaged The Visible World. Given the option, I would give it 3.5 stars.

I actually struggled with maintaining interest in the first section of the book, the Memoir. I had trouble surmising where the story was going and I hadn't found myself attached enough to any character to really care; the anonymous narrator may have played a role in my lack of investment in the story as well. The Intermezzo, section 2, was little different, mostly because it was a bit disjointed. Then Section 3, the novel, wandered in and I was much more captivated. Quite honestly, although I understand the idea of telling the same story in three different manners, I could have been satisfied with Part 3 only and with it being more thoroughly developed.

Slouka's writing is beautiful; he uses langauage in a musical, magical fashion. The story is fair, though the plot twist involving Tomas and Ivana in Prague was unexpected; I assumed up to that point that Tomas had died in the siege of the church. Ivana's suicide? Honestly, a bit too much like the suicide in Sarah's Key to my taste. Sure, I respect survivor guilt, but I've got limits on my tolerance for major characters deciding to end their life as a result. So, yes, I found the plot a bit pedestrian overall. And as far as my ability to connect with the characters, it was mixed at best. There were a number of characters who came through fleetingly whom I would have liked to have known better. Ivana, and in many ways Antonin as well, were simply tragic figures. I certainly would have liked some backstory on Ivana and Tomas because the writing intimates that they knew each other prior to the meeting where they were "introduced".

It's a good book, and one I may find myself liking more after my reading group discusses it at the end of the month. We'll see. But for now, I'm calling it slightly above average.

Addendum: Sadly, I missed reading group this month. It was a dark and busy call night. I suppose I'll just have to wonder....(less)

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Aug 12, 2009 Adeena rated it 3 of 5 stars

Beautiful, dreamy prose, which make even the uneventful parts of the novel pleasurable in some way. A story about a man's search to understand his mother's past. The first section describes the narrator's childhood growing up in the United States in the shadow of Czech history, his parents part in the resistance, and the handful of Czech expats that surrounded him like family throughout his young life. In the second section, the narrator relocates to the Czech Republic and tries to find answers...more

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Jun 25, 2009 Barner rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a great book! A novel about WWII with a couple ( I think two is correct) love stories and a great deal of quiet action. The novel is sad, beautifully written and though some of the description (concentration camps) is svery haunting, the story is a page turner. The man's discovery of his mother's story, imagined and true, is developed with great skill. As I read this book, I felt like I was reading a FINE book. I can't wait to recommed it to the next person who comes to my door---whoever...more

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Nov 15, 2008 Joyce rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: those who read a lot

Shelves: fiction-and-literature

I truly enjoyed this book. I liked the writing and the flow and the vignettes that gave so much feeling to the characters.

I think that possibly this book would appeal to European readers more than Americans. It is not about plot and story, per se.

Rather, it starts with the author's memories, then moves to his attempt as an adult to find out more about his parents' pasts, and then the third movement is his imagining of what might have happened once he's collected and observed.

Beyond the personal...more

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Mar 12, 2009 Alice rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: spring-challenge-09

This book has three very distinct sections laid out with three different headings. I found the first half of the book quite disjointed due to this but by the time I got to a quarter of the way through the third section I was riveted. It all came together in a way I hadn't imagined.

I am going to Prague in two weeks and it was good to learn a bit about the country's history during the second world war and I'm looking forward to seeing the architecture! This book has warmed me up nicely for me trip...more

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Jan 24, 2010 Lisa Michele rated it 3 of 5 stars

First of all, wonderful writing! Not shy with the metaphors, Slouka gives you such a tangible sense of these people's lives by using very small, realistic details. The story was difficult and sometimes a little slow, and also sad. But if you like WWII stories, I recommend it. An example of the prose: "A gray day. The wind, a warm breath, moved the leaves, lifted the dirty curls of one of the skateboarders out of his eyes, slid a paper bag a short distance along the walk. And sitting there I coul...more

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Sep 12, 2010 Miss GP rated it 5 of 5 stars

Although The Visible World is a short book, it's not a quick read. Slouka's writing is so rich and evocative that I found myself wanting to savor every paragraph. I found that each time I picked up this book I had a hard time getting into it at first; I'd have to re-read the first few paragraphs because Slouka's style required concentration. Once I was able to adapt to the cadence of his writing, though, I didn't want to stop, becoming fully immersed in the scenes he was creating. I found this a...more

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Feb 02, 2010 Tracey rated it 2 of 5 stars

This story is both odd and intersting in the telling or rather search of discovery a son embarks upon to learn the facts of his deceased mothers' past. A tragic love affair in times of war: not so unusual but the story flows much like a stream of consciousness bouncing in and out of past and present, one story and another. I found that it did not really hold my interest and there were no real surprises unearthed.

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