Mark Slouka

This book arrived awhile ago but with everything going on, I haven't had a chance to properly enjoy it. I've only managed to read the introduction and the first two essays. It might sound strange but in addition to enjoying these essays immensely, I also really liked the introductory notes. Not sure that's ever happened before....most often I skip over the introduction completely. Anyway, I like his writing style very much. This is not a book I can race through, instead, I'd like to read an essay and have time to reflect on it before moving on to the next. The essays are very thought provoking ... I love stuff like this.… (mere)

A thoughtful, superbly written, and, above all, terribly sad book. Some reviewers here have complained about this one's unconventional structure, but both the author and the narrator seem to have started where they were: growing up in the shadow of their parents' lives, which were shaped by unimaginably powerful world-historical forces. To the narrator, who grows up in the United States, his parents' memories of Central Europe have a terrible power and a storybook strageness, which is well-reflected in this section's brittle, haunted prose. His search for them in contemporary Prauge yields little: too much time has passed, and too many have died, during the occupation then or since. The book's third section, in which the narrator and author knowingly fill in the empty spaces in their narrative using fiction, is the book's most coherent, and undoubtedly the book's best. It's a thrilling recounting of the plot to kill Reinhard Heydrich, but also an excruciatingly effective portrait of a terrible time in which a single mistake could lead to one's death, along with the death of countless others. The author doesn't spare us the details here, whether describing all it was necessary to avoid collaborators or the soldiers in the streets or providing a second-by-second reconstruction of the Czech partisan's justly famous assassination operation. This was a tough one to read. I probably shouldn't have read it in quarantine.

But "The Visible World" also a love story, which plays out with such high stakes and such extreme emotions that I often found myself wanting to put it down, just to spare myself some stress. And that's a compliment, mind you. The contrast between the occupation's barbarity and the romantic idyll experienced the by one of the couples in its midst is almost too much to take: the way the plot barrels forward, you'd think the author was writing a thriller. Which he is, in a way, I suppose, but this novel's literary excellence are also too good to go unmentioned. Space in "The Visible World" is neatly split into two halves: underground and overground, and a motif that echoes beautifully throughout all three sections of the novel. We get a beautiful contrast, too, between the deep, almost untouched Czech woods and fascism's forthrightly anti-human aesthetics. We get some beautiful love scenes, and Slouka can make you feel how tangibly death hung over occupied Europe at that point in history. As I mentioned, this was a tough one to read. I probably shouldn't have read it in quarantine. But, whether or not you're used to unconventional narrative structures, I'd recommend it highly.… (mere)

This memoir made for frustrating - interesting, but still frustrating - reading. The author warns early on that this work is nonlinear and I wondered as I read if that was really necessary. The story might have made more sense if it unfolded linearly. The tale is definitely interesting, featuring a mother struggling with mental illness and addiction, a family living through Nazi occupation and then a Soviet takeover, and a forbidden love affair. Still, I finished this book with a sense of relief that it was over and I had made it to the end. It's an interesting read, but it's just not for me.… (mere)