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Book Reviewed by: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 Worldis 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.
Slouka creates a tangible whole that leaves the reader well satisfied and, by extrapolation, forms a foundation of "truth" about the narrator's parents on which he can build the rest of his life...continued
Full Review
(780 words)
(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
The lands now known as The Czech Republic and Slovakia were ruled by the Austrian-Hungarian Empire for about 300 years until the end of World War I and the collapse of the empire. In 1918, a union was proclaimed between the Czech lands and Slovakia to form the Czechoslovakian state, an idea that had been advocated by Czech and Slovak political leaders and intellectuals for sometime. However, although the majority of Czechs and Slovaks shared a similar language they held greatly differing religious, cultural and social traditions. In addition, the Czech lands were far more industrialized than Slovakia, particularly in the ethnically German area of the Bohemian and Moravian border regions (called the Sudetenland in German) that represented 22...
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Elizabeth Berg, author of Durable Goods and Range of Motion
Rich with intelligence and poetic detail, The Visible World demonstrates why Mark Slouka is one of our finest contemporary novelists.
