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The Visible World
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 atmosphere haunted by fragments of a past he cannot understand. At the heart of that past is his mother, Ivana, a spontaneous, passionate woman drifting ever closer to despair. As an adult, the narrator travels to Prague, hoping to learn about a love affair between his then young mother and a member of the resistance named Tomas, an affair whose untimely end, he senses, lay behind Ivana's unhappiness. Ultimately unable to complete his knowledge of the past, he imagines the two lovers as participants in one of the more dramatic (and true) moments of the war, and through the deeply romantic story he tells, creates not only the ending of their story but the beginning of his own.
The Visible World is a literary page-turner and an immensely moving novel about the vagaries of love and our need to make sense of life through the telling of stories.
The Visible World is a literary page-turner and an immensely moving novel about the vagaries of love and our need to make sense of life through the telling of stories.
242 pages, Hardcover
First published April 19, 2007
93 people are currently reading
1188 people want to read
About the author
Mark Slouka
18 books110 followersMark Slouka most recent books are the story collection All That Is Left Is All That Matters, the memoir Nobody’s Son, and the award-winning novel Brewster. His work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, and the PEN / O. Henry Prize Stories. He lives in Prague.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 217 reviews
August 29, 2008
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 realised it was fantastic :)
I can highly recommend this book to you if you're interested in history or simply want to read an unusual romance.
I can highly recommend this book to you if you're interested in history or simply want to read an unusual romance.
November 4, 2011
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".
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".
December 9, 2018
Moving to Prague this year, I was struck by the thriving book culture. Within a square kilometer of the Old Town Center, there are at least half a dozen bookstores with fairly strong English book sections, and many more that specialize in Czech publications. All of these stores feature sections with Czech authors in English translation, and I have to say the selection is not extensive, limited as it is to a good 20-30 authors that number Hrabal, Hacek, Capek, Kundera, Kafka, Ivan Klima, Havel, etc. However, filed amongst the regular English language books, I came across an American author, whom I had not heard of before, but who was very handsomely represented. This author is Mark Slouka, a first generation American of Czecholovak descent, his parents having emigrated to the United States sometime following the second world war. Slouka has so far published eight books in total, comprising essays, short stories, novels and a memoir.
I thought it would be interesting to read a man with this dual cultural background, so I picked up a handful of his books. After reading his latest collection of short stories – “All That is Left is All That Matters,” I decided to move on to “The Visible World,” Slouka’s second novel published in 2009. And, whereas the short stories gave a somewhat mixed image of the author, and did not completely win me over, this little novel was exactly what I was hoping for from the author.
America was my foreground, familiar and known: the crowds, the voices, Captain Kangaroo and Mister Magoo, the great trains clattering and tilting west, pulling out of the seam in the summer wall as my father and I sat waiting in the DeSoto on Old Orchard Road. Behind it, though, for as long as I can remember, was the Old World, its shape and feel and smell, like the pattern of wallpaper coming through the paint.
Slouka describes an American boyhood of the 1960s/’70s with a middle-class backdrop, somewhere on the East Coast, more or less the way it has been rendered in countless coming-of-age stories by American authors. The holidays spent in cabins on lakeshores loom large in the memory of the narrator, as does the various characters and family friends from the “old world,” who enter and exit the lives of the family in this new world that they hesitate to make their own. Underneath the otherwise placid surface of this relatively quiet and tranquil American childhood, the narrator always knows that there are things in his parents’ past that are unspoken, and that prevent them from enjoying a truly happy life as a family.
It wasn’t a matter of jealousy or fear. My parents never slept in separate beds or took vacations with “old friends” or hurt each other more than husbands and wives generally hurt each other. It was subtler than that. My mother respected my father’s strength, his endurance, was grateful to him for taking on the role he had for her with such tact, but hated him for it too. And because she recognized the injustice in this, she loved him – or tried. And because she knew he recognized it too, she failed.
The small story is always greater than the larger history, but the larger history always imposes itself on the small story. So, as our storyteller grows up, recollecting fishing trips and late night swimming in lakes, family road trips and social gatherings, the larger history creeps into his story. What happened to the man from the old country, who hobbles along joyfully on two canes, because he “lost” all his toes on both feet in some camp? Who was Reinhard Heydrich, whose name often seeps into the conversations of people from the old world like a poison. As time passes, many of these questions are answered, and our narrator of course gradually comes to know the history of his people and country, and yet, the story most intimately connected to his own – that of his parents – remains elusive.
Slouka deceptively titled the first part of this novel “A Memoir,” and then, the second half as “A Novel” – a sequence that in all fairness could just as well be reversed. However, it is in the second part that the story of the narrator’s parents is told, along with the story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The latter story, which has been chronicled endlessly both in history books and fiction, has not in my experience been told with greater sense of honesty and economy of detail than it is here. It is the more powerful for it. And yet, such is Slouka’s ability as a storyteller that the small story – that of the narrator’s mother and father – eclipses the almost incomprehensible tragedy that the assassination of one of the worst war criminals of the 20th century visited upon the Czech people. The world indeed dies with each of us.
The jacket copy of my edition of the book draws comparisons to Milan Kundera and Michael Ondaatje. Kundera is certainly evoked due to his own Czech background, and due to the structure of the novel, which in some ways bear comparison to “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” The Ondaatje connection is also apt enough, in my view mainly as it pertains to Slouka’s style of writing, which, like Ondaatje’s, is very lyrical and precise. That said, Slouka has neither the philosophical musings of Kundera, nor, the literariness of Ondaatje. He maintains his focus on the story as it is, and what he achieves is a greater sense of immediacy and authenticity.
I thought it would be interesting to read a man with this dual cultural background, so I picked up a handful of his books. After reading his latest collection of short stories – “All That is Left is All That Matters,” I decided to move on to “The Visible World,” Slouka’s second novel published in 2009. And, whereas the short stories gave a somewhat mixed image of the author, and did not completely win me over, this little novel was exactly what I was hoping for from the author.
America was my foreground, familiar and known: the crowds, the voices, Captain Kangaroo and Mister Magoo, the great trains clattering and tilting west, pulling out of the seam in the summer wall as my father and I sat waiting in the DeSoto on Old Orchard Road. Behind it, though, for as long as I can remember, was the Old World, its shape and feel and smell, like the pattern of wallpaper coming through the paint.
Slouka describes an American boyhood of the 1960s/’70s with a middle-class backdrop, somewhere on the East Coast, more or less the way it has been rendered in countless coming-of-age stories by American authors. The holidays spent in cabins on lakeshores loom large in the memory of the narrator, as does the various characters and family friends from the “old world,” who enter and exit the lives of the family in this new world that they hesitate to make their own. Underneath the otherwise placid surface of this relatively quiet and tranquil American childhood, the narrator always knows that there are things in his parents’ past that are unspoken, and that prevent them from enjoying a truly happy life as a family.
It wasn’t a matter of jealousy or fear. My parents never slept in separate beds or took vacations with “old friends” or hurt each other more than husbands and wives generally hurt each other. It was subtler than that. My mother respected my father’s strength, his endurance, was grateful to him for taking on the role he had for her with such tact, but hated him for it too. And because she recognized the injustice in this, she loved him – or tried. And because she knew he recognized it too, she failed.
The small story is always greater than the larger history, but the larger history always imposes itself on the small story. So, as our storyteller grows up, recollecting fishing trips and late night swimming in lakes, family road trips and social gatherings, the larger history creeps into his story. What happened to the man from the old country, who hobbles along joyfully on two canes, because he “lost” all his toes on both feet in some camp? Who was Reinhard Heydrich, whose name often seeps into the conversations of people from the old world like a poison. As time passes, many of these questions are answered, and our narrator of course gradually comes to know the history of his people and country, and yet, the story most intimately connected to his own – that of his parents – remains elusive.
Slouka deceptively titled the first part of this novel “A Memoir,” and then, the second half as “A Novel” – a sequence that in all fairness could just as well be reversed. However, it is in the second part that the story of the narrator’s parents is told, along with the story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. The latter story, which has been chronicled endlessly both in history books and fiction, has not in my experience been told with greater sense of honesty and economy of detail than it is here. It is the more powerful for it. And yet, such is Slouka’s ability as a storyteller that the small story – that of the narrator’s mother and father – eclipses the almost incomprehensible tragedy that the assassination of one of the worst war criminals of the 20th century visited upon the Czech people. The world indeed dies with each of us.
The jacket copy of my edition of the book draws comparisons to Milan Kundera and Michael Ondaatje. Kundera is certainly evoked due to his own Czech background, and due to the structure of the novel, which in some ways bear comparison to “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” The Ondaatje connection is also apt enough, in my view mainly as it pertains to Slouka’s style of writing, which, like Ondaatje’s, is very lyrical and precise. That said, Slouka has neither the philosophical musings of Kundera, nor, the literariness of Ondaatje. He maintains his focus on the story as it is, and what he achieves is a greater sense of immediacy and authenticity.
May 27, 2010
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 an intermezzo, entitle Prague.
The story was narrated by a son of Czech immigrants who flew from America to Prague in order to recollect his family’s past.
Slouka initally tells of the heroic account of seven Czech parachutists who assassinated a high-ranking Nazi way back in 1942. This was surrounded by execution of a thousand lives and many attempts to escape from brutal hands of Nazis. However, what becomes center of the boy’s recollection is the reason behind his mother’s loneliness. He suspects that his mother had a great wartime love. He traveled to Prague and, in the novel part, told of his mother’s tale.
His mother and father were already seeing each other back then when Ivana and Tomas fell in love. But when they parted ways, Ivana never heard from him again. She did not know (or perhaps knew but could not accept) that Tomas was killed by the Nazis. And the boy’s father, who always loved Ivana, promised that he would always be there when Tomas is gone.
The boy’s father is a loving, intelligent and successful man, he knows how to make any woman laugh, and one cannot find any reason not to love him. He is almost everything, but there is one thing he is not: he is not Tomas.
The Visible World is Mark Slouka’s magnificent rendition of the capacity of love – how it can make a person whole, and how its absence can shatter one into pieces.
http://flipthrough.wordpress.com/2010...
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 an intermezzo, entitle Prague.
The story was narrated by a son of Czech immigrants who flew from America to Prague in order to recollect his family’s past.
Slouka initally tells of the heroic account of seven Czech parachutists who assassinated a high-ranking Nazi way back in 1942. This was surrounded by execution of a thousand lives and many attempts to escape from brutal hands of Nazis. However, what becomes center of the boy’s recollection is the reason behind his mother’s loneliness. He suspects that his mother had a great wartime love. He traveled to Prague and, in the novel part, told of his mother’s tale.
His mother and father were already seeing each other back then when Ivana and Tomas fell in love. But when they parted ways, Ivana never heard from him again. She did not know (or perhaps knew but could not accept) that Tomas was killed by the Nazis. And the boy’s father, who always loved Ivana, promised that he would always be there when Tomas is gone.
The boy’s father is a loving, intelligent and successful man, he knows how to make any woman laugh, and one cannot find any reason not to love him. He is almost everything, but there is one thing he is not: he is not Tomas.
The Visible World is Mark Slouka’s magnificent rendition of the capacity of love – how it can make a person whole, and how its absence can shatter one into pieces.
http://flipthrough.wordpress.com/2010...
March 3, 2009
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 the US-UK-Franco-heavy emphasis that my studies have always taken. Additionally, it details devastatingly the long-term, personal effects of that kind of trauma--both the destruction of one's country by external powers, as well as the loss of all-consuming, heart-stopping, soul-defining passion and love. The characters are complex, well-rounded to the point of tangibility and there is nothing to do but love them all.
At the end, The Visible World is one of those books that I don't know if I will ever be able or want to read again, but that I will keep on my bookshelf forever all the same.
At the end, The Visible World is one of those books that I don't know if I will ever be able or want to read again, but that I will keep on my bookshelf forever all the same.
August 7, 2014
While Slouka's prose is beautiful, and there's no doubt he's an extremely talented writer, the structure of this book bothered me. A coherent plot doesn't emerge until more than halfway through - until then, it's just a series of vignettes which, though evocative and vivid, failed to engage my interest fully. It's a shame that the pivotal romance, the most important element of the story, isn't explored until near the end; as a result, I didn't care about the characters as much as I felt I should.
August 25, 2008
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.
February 4, 2024
Beautiful, heartbreaking and compelling with singular prose. An American-born man's search to understand his Czech mother's story, who she was during WW II.
November 19, 2012
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.
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.
December 7, 2008
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 at the theatre and they'll say, 'I had an acquaintance many years ago' or 'I once knew someone who I cared for very much who also hated sauerkraut,' and suddenly, standing there waiting to give the butcher your order, or clutching your paper ticket, you can see them leaning into the current's pull, hear the rocks of the riverbed clattering like bones."
"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 at the theatre and they'll say, 'I had an acquaintance many years ago' or 'I once knew someone who I cared for very much who also hated sauerkraut,' and suddenly, standing there waiting to give the butcher your order, or clutching your paper ticket, you can see them leaning into the current's pull, hear the rocks of the riverbed clattering like bones."
March 3, 2009
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.
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.
October 24, 2014
This is an extremely hard book for me to rate. The prose throughout was some of the most beautifully written that I have ever read so I would give the book 5 stars based on that. However, the first two sections were so wandering and eventually borderline tedious that I would only give it 1 star. The final section truly redeemed the book, which was interesting and a real page turner. I wish Slouka would have made the book into a novella and only used the third part of the book. I felt like the first two chapters, which gave background of sorts, were not necessary. The third part told the story completely and in a compelling way.
I would recommend this book to others to read because of the imagery created masterfully by Slouka's words, but I would say read only the third section.
I am curious to read his other works, but I think I would check them out of the library before buying them like with The Visible World.
I will average the 5 stars with the 1 star for 3 stars for the book.
I would recommend this book to others to read because of the imagery created masterfully by Slouka's words, but I would say read only the third section.
I am curious to read his other works, but I think I would check them out of the library before buying them like with The Visible World.
I will average the 5 stars with the 1 star for 3 stars for the book.
November 5, 2009
Hmmm - a bit 'up itself' in terms of style = every single word and phrase is so self-consciously literary, metaphoric and symbolic, which, while good in the sense that this is 'real' literature, does detract too much from the story being told, in my opinion (and I'm the first one to love the journey rather than the destination!).
A little like looking through a glass darkly, and no real sense of the people or places depicted. Quite touching in places though, especially the lost love interest.
A little like looking through a glass darkly, and no real sense of the people or places depicted. Quite touching in places though, especially the lost love interest.
September 1, 2007
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.
September 12, 2013
This is a beautifully written book. The writing is fluent and reads like poetry. The themes of love, loss, war, family are all extremely well dealt with. I will definitely read more books by this author.
May 3, 2020
Ova knjiga je tako "čudna".
U isto vrijeme je ne voliš i voliš.
Čudno, jako čudno.
Stil pisanja jako zanimljiv, tema odlična, ali isto tako nešto u tom načinu pisanja me smorilo, ali me tjeralo da je pročitam i saznam sve.
Za kraj sam znala da nije sretan, ali nisam mislila da ce biti ovakav.
Potpuno drugačije sam zamišljala da se završila njihova prica. Imaš
šansu ali eto... ne želiš je.
Baš knjiga koju voliš i mrziš.
U isto vrijeme je ne voliš i voliš.
Čudno, jako čudno.
Stil pisanja jako zanimljiv, tema odlična, ali isto tako nešto u tom načinu pisanja me smorilo, ali me tjeralo da je pročitam i saznam sve.
Za kraj sam znala da nije sretan, ali nisam mislila da ce biti ovakav.
Potpuno drugačije sam zamišljala da se završila njihova prica. Imaš
šansu ali eto... ne želiš je.
Baš knjiga koju voliš i mrziš.
June 14, 2021
This book has such a feeling of melancholy about it and brilliantly evokes the difficulty of digging up information about painful experiences of your parents - of making sense of the impact of those events on them and on you. Beautifully written.
Want to read
March 3, 2018Recommendation from @mysweetcaro.life - 3/2/2018
July 27, 2023
The Visible World is a curious book, both inspired and flawed. There is much to appreciate in it, but it certainly won't be to everyone's taste.
Very briefly it is part love story, part family history and part thriller, set mainly in German-occupied Czechoslovakia during the Second World War against the real-life events surrounding the assassination of Nazi Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. The story is mostly narrated by the son of the main female protagonist, and starts in post-war New York to where their family has emigrated. The early part of the book is chiefly concerned with the lives of the emigrant Czech community in the US and the son's attempts to piece together the true story of his parents' experiences during the War. He discovers that his mother had a passionate affair with a man who had a key role in Heydrich's assassination, but she ended up settling for marrying the narrator's father, someone she would never love in the same way.
As even many of the negative reviews have conceded, Slouka is a superb wordsmith. The literary style does become somewhat over-wrought at times though, using more words when less would do the job just as well or better. For example there is the occasional superfluous simile (e.g. "... a black wallet open in her hand like a miniature bellows, or something with gills." Surely just one is enough?). The author also seems hell-bent on giving us a weather report in virtually every scene; Slouka's descriptions of the elements are of typically high quality, but I can imagine it getting on some peoples' nerves.
The book gives a bleakly harrowing account of life and death in the grip of a murderous dictatorship. It also brings into stark focus the ambiguous legacy of the killing of the Reich Protector. Heydrich was a nasty piece of work, a personal favourite of Hitler's and a principal architect of the Holocaust, and so on one level the operation to assassinate him was an impressive triumph and a thrilling blow against the Nazi regime. But he was just one man, and so many Czechs died in the brutal reprisals that followed that the question is inevitably raised: was it really worth it?
But here again the novel sometimes overdoes things, forgetting that less is often more. It would be difficult to entirely rob these events of their power to shock, but sometimes this book comes dangerously close. That said, many of the atrocities are chillingly and effectively sketched.
For me however one of the main problems is the non-chronological narrative. This was one of those occasions when its use of this device felt gratuitous, so much so that I was too often left unsure of where I was in the timeline. A more linear narrative would have served this story much better.
Another negative is the omnipresent narrator; the son is thinly sketched and apt to reminisce rather than getting on with the story. There are endless anecdotes of the man's childhood, many of which seemed completely pointless. Even later in the book, when the wartime story belatedly takes centre-stage, the narrator continues to intrude with periodic references to "my mother" and "my father". This wasn't the son's story at this point and he should have just kept out of it.
This is a powerful story, beautifully written in places, and exploring some thought-provoking themes along the way: the brutal realities of war and the ethically complex choices involved; the nature of love; the opaque and bittersweet dynamics of family life. But for me the novel feels weighed down by the flab of over-used literary devices, excessive introspection, intrusive metaphors and an over-complex narrative. The story doesn't need all that and it deserved to be told without it. If this kind of slow-paced, rather flowery literary style is to your taste then I think you will find the effort worthwhile; otherwise you're more likely to give up in frustration.
Very briefly it is part love story, part family history and part thriller, set mainly in German-occupied Czechoslovakia during the Second World War against the real-life events surrounding the assassination of Nazi Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. The story is mostly narrated by the son of the main female protagonist, and starts in post-war New York to where their family has emigrated. The early part of the book is chiefly concerned with the lives of the emigrant Czech community in the US and the son's attempts to piece together the true story of his parents' experiences during the War. He discovers that his mother had a passionate affair with a man who had a key role in Heydrich's assassination, but she ended up settling for marrying the narrator's father, someone she would never love in the same way.
As even many of the negative reviews have conceded, Slouka is a superb wordsmith. The literary style does become somewhat over-wrought at times though, using more words when less would do the job just as well or better. For example there is the occasional superfluous simile (e.g. "... a black wallet open in her hand like a miniature bellows, or something with gills." Surely just one is enough?). The author also seems hell-bent on giving us a weather report in virtually every scene; Slouka's descriptions of the elements are of typically high quality, but I can imagine it getting on some peoples' nerves.
The book gives a bleakly harrowing account of life and death in the grip of a murderous dictatorship. It also brings into stark focus the ambiguous legacy of the killing of the Reich Protector. Heydrich was a nasty piece of work, a personal favourite of Hitler's and a principal architect of the Holocaust, and so on one level the operation to assassinate him was an impressive triumph and a thrilling blow against the Nazi regime. But he was just one man, and so many Czechs died in the brutal reprisals that followed that the question is inevitably raised: was it really worth it?
But here again the novel sometimes overdoes things, forgetting that less is often more. It would be difficult to entirely rob these events of their power to shock, but sometimes this book comes dangerously close. That said, many of the atrocities are chillingly and effectively sketched.
For me however one of the main problems is the non-chronological narrative. This was one of those occasions when its use of this device felt gratuitous, so much so that I was too often left unsure of where I was in the timeline. A more linear narrative would have served this story much better.
Another negative is the omnipresent narrator; the son is thinly sketched and apt to reminisce rather than getting on with the story. There are endless anecdotes of the man's childhood, many of which seemed completely pointless. Even later in the book, when the wartime story belatedly takes centre-stage, the narrator continues to intrude with periodic references to "my mother" and "my father". This wasn't the son's story at this point and he should have just kept out of it.
This is a powerful story, beautifully written in places, and exploring some thought-provoking themes along the way: the brutal realities of war and the ethically complex choices involved; the nature of love; the opaque and bittersweet dynamics of family life. But for me the novel feels weighed down by the flab of over-used literary devices, excessive introspection, intrusive metaphors and an over-complex narrative. The story doesn't need all that and it deserved to be told without it. If this kind of slow-paced, rather flowery literary style is to your taste then I think you will find the effort worthwhile; otherwise you're more likely to give up in frustration.
October 20, 2014
First and foremost this is a novel. The reason why I state this from the beginning of this review is that it initially reads as a slightly whimsical memoir, which is clearly a device. Stylistically clever the first half of the story has the the vagaries and half recollections of a adult reminiscing on his childhood in New York. Slouka uses the style of half remembered events and semi-comprehended moments to great affect.
The narrator describes growing up in New York, the son of Czech emigres in a tiny apartment where diverse characters would meet, play music and speak about the War, in Czech. There are many references to the War, and hints at of a man who lost his life at the hands of the Nazis and the famed assassination of the SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich by resistance fighters in Prague. There are hints that the nameless man was his mother's wartime lover, and that she still loved him. That his calm reasonable writer father knows, understands and accepts this, and whilst his mother is portrayed as unsettled and distant his father is always calm, practical and long suffering. Slouka describes the half life of an exile, the way emigrants band together and emotionally remain in the countries and continents they escape from.
This section of the book ends in tragedy and then leads to a 'Novel' where we a brought to believe that the writer attempts to fill in the gaps of his parents wartime experiences in the form of fiction. This is the stronger half of the story, although stylistically the vagueness and whimsy remains and the work is self-consciously literary to the point of boredom. The story and the plot remain thin, unfortunately, and as with most of the book, the details about Nazi occupation is vague, the love scenes are vaguely erotic and the ending forgetable. Saying that, I did enjoy it for the touches of poetry and the very evocative nature of 1960s and 70S New York and Prague, the use of real historical figures in a fictionalised setting, and the relationship between real life and filling in the gaps with imaginary events.
The narrator describes growing up in New York, the son of Czech emigres in a tiny apartment where diverse characters would meet, play music and speak about the War, in Czech. There are many references to the War, and hints at of a man who lost his life at the hands of the Nazis and the famed assassination of the SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich by resistance fighters in Prague. There are hints that the nameless man was his mother's wartime lover, and that she still loved him. That his calm reasonable writer father knows, understands and accepts this, and whilst his mother is portrayed as unsettled and distant his father is always calm, practical and long suffering. Slouka describes the half life of an exile, the way emigrants band together and emotionally remain in the countries and continents they escape from.
This section of the book ends in tragedy and then leads to a 'Novel' where we a brought to believe that the writer attempts to fill in the gaps of his parents wartime experiences in the form of fiction. This is the stronger half of the story, although stylistically the vagueness and whimsy remains and the work is self-consciously literary to the point of boredom. The story and the plot remain thin, unfortunately, and as with most of the book, the details about Nazi occupation is vague, the love scenes are vaguely erotic and the ending forgetable. Saying that, I did enjoy it for the touches of poetry and the very evocative nature of 1960s and 70S New York and Prague, the use of real historical figures in a fictionalised setting, and the relationship between real life and filling in the gaps with imaginary events.
June 9, 2016
This book has had quite mixed reviews that fall into the either very high or very low and I think that's an accurate estimate of how any individual reader will respond. I have to say that I think it's an odd choice for Richard & Judy because they tend to choose the obvious 'good reads' that are fairly superficial and, in my opinion, instantly forgettable. This, however, is neither.
The wartime love story genre usually tends to be full of over-ripe emotions, and (soap) operatic story-lines - this isn't. It's an immensely subtle, elegiac and emotionally-restrained tale of a man's search for a past.
In three parts, the first part is a memoir of an unnamed narrator growing up with Czech emigrant parents in New York. This is both charming and dark with shadows that will stretch into the future.
The second part is a brief intermezzo which takes him to Prague as an adult where he meets various veterans of the war who tell a variety of stories that intersect with, but are not, the story of his parents. The third part, called a novel, is the narrator's fictional imagining of what might have been his mother's story and her love for a man who wasn't his father, set in the tense years of 1942.
For a relatively short book (250 pages) this touches all kinds of important themes: the fragility of identity, the extent to which we ever 'know' anyone, even the people closest to us, memory and the fictionalision of our own lives, love, idealism, death.
It's not a straightforward linear narrative which might be one the things that some readers have found problematic, but that is itself one of the themes of the book: the way the past and present are mosaics that shift to tell different stories depending on our own perspective.
Overall I found this is moving book written in confident sometimes poetic but always unpretentious prose that is all the more moving for its very emotional restraint.
The wartime love story genre usually tends to be full of over-ripe emotions, and (soap) operatic story-lines - this isn't. It's an immensely subtle, elegiac and emotionally-restrained tale of a man's search for a past.
In three parts, the first part is a memoir of an unnamed narrator growing up with Czech emigrant parents in New York. This is both charming and dark with shadows that will stretch into the future.
The second part is a brief intermezzo which takes him to Prague as an adult where he meets various veterans of the war who tell a variety of stories that intersect with, but are not, the story of his parents. The third part, called a novel, is the narrator's fictional imagining of what might have been his mother's story and her love for a man who wasn't his father, set in the tense years of 1942.
For a relatively short book (250 pages) this touches all kinds of important themes: the fragility of identity, the extent to which we ever 'know' anyone, even the people closest to us, memory and the fictionalision of our own lives, love, idealism, death.
It's not a straightforward linear narrative which might be one the things that some readers have found problematic, but that is itself one of the themes of the book: the way the past and present are mosaics that shift to tell different stories depending on our own perspective.
Overall I found this is moving book written in confident sometimes poetic but always unpretentious prose that is all the more moving for its very emotional restraint.
December 17, 2011
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 mother was simply more often mundane and repetitive, but I found the book moved more quickly for me in the latter stories.
With the fictional, although entirely plausible, account of the early life of his mother and her first and only love, it is a heartbreaking rendering of guilt beyond comprehension and stayed with me long after I had finished the book.
The author's command of language and his evocative phrasing makes this a beautiful read and the story, although complex, was eminently satisfying.
With the fictional, although entirely plausible, account of the early life of his mother and her first and only love, it is a heartbreaking rendering of guilt beyond comprehension and stayed with me long after I had finished the book.
The author's command of language and his evocative phrasing makes this a beautiful read and the story, although complex, was eminently satisfying.
Read
August 2, 2011This 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. It seems to be about piecing together fragments of your past to make a whole you can live with or reconcile yourself to, the redemptive nature of a story in making sense of life. Unlike some reviewers here, I really didn't find it slow, the mystery built, the writing was beautiful. Cleverly structured and emotionally powerful, I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys books like Birdsong or Random Acts of Heroic Love.
April 13, 2008
Although this book has been highly critically acclaimed, I didn't find my way into it, even though I tried really hard and read the whole thing in 5 days.
The story is very interesting in general, but I found the way Slouka wrote just too difficult and exhausting for the topic. Sometimes I went through 20 pages and couldn't tell what was going on AT ALL.
The book is beautifully written, but it is a hard read, so definitely nothing good if you're looking for anentertaining quick read.
The story is very interesting in general, but I found the way Slouka wrote just too difficult and exhausting for the topic. Sometimes I went through 20 pages and couldn't tell what was going on AT ALL.
The book is beautifully written, but it is a hard read, so definitely nothing good if you're looking for anentertaining quick read.
April 4, 2007
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!
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!
August 19, 2007
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.
December 20, 2007
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.
May 22, 2008
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.
October 18, 2011
Simply one of the best novels I have ever read. Wrecked me in all the right ways.
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