agmaynard's review
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.0
Beautiful, wrenching, thoughtfully and interestingly composed. An interrupted, doomed love story. Mentions of off page child sexual assault and domestic violence, animal cruelty on page.
“We don’t always remember what we deserve to, or want to. We remember what we have to, which isn’t quite the same thing. We remember because one memory has elbowed aside the others.”
And much later in the narrative: “Facts are just scaffolding for the heart.”
“We don’t always remember what we deserve to, or want to. We remember what we have to, which isn’t quite the same thing. We remember because one memory has elbowed aside the others.”
And much later in the narrative: “Facts are just scaffolding for the heart.”
Content Warnings
Graphic: Domestic abuse, Animal cruelty, Sexual assault, and Child abuse
missclioreads's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
So beautifully written - I really enjoyed this memoir.
shelfimprovement's review against another edition
4.0
Mark Slouka has built a writing career by mining the phenomenal story of his parents’ escape from Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia, their largely loveless marriage and rootless adult lives, and the mental illness that destroyed his relationship with his mother. In this memoir, he insists that much of this was unconsciously done. Even when he knowingly picked up facts from their lives, he didn’t realize how much else was permeating his work.
Slouka’s father died in late 2013. His mother, with whom he’d long had a strained and sometimes estranged relationship, was in the final stages of a dementia that had essentially wiped clean her memory of her only son. Feeling adrift, essentially an orphan, Slouka began to write about his hazy understanding of their stories in an attempt to make peace with his losses and to build a more complete mental picture of who his parents actually were.
This was not a particularly easy book to read because Slouka doesn’t write a linear narrative. It’s mostly broken down into small chunks, part filling in details he knows about his parents’ lives and part meditating on the concept of memory versus truth. It’s a very philosophical, very psychoanalytic memoir that I would describe as “a book for writers.” The sentences are lovely, the thoughts provocative, but whatever story he manages to present is often muddled. It’s not until perhaps the final third of the book that it really and truly started to gel for me, when he starts to present what he knows: his mother, Olga, was impregnated by her father, then quickly married off to Zdenek Slouka, a young man she’d known for a few weeks and the pregnancy terminated. After the Second World War ended and Communism took hold of their country, Zdenek grew involved in the resistance, became a target, and was forced to find a way out of the country with his new wife. They lived in refugee camps in Innsbruck, Austria, for a year and a half.
At Innsbruck, the two were separated out of necessity and Olga embarked on an affair with a man identified only as F. Olga and Zdenek managed to obtain entry to Australia for a time, eventually moving around to various homes around the United States--Queens, upstate, Bethlehem, PA. For much of this time, Olga considered F. her true love. They corresponded for a time, lost touch, tried and failed to find their way back to one another. Meanwhile, Mark was born and Olga descended into an unnamed mental illness that looks a lot like bipolar disorder. The side effects of her addictive medication were nearly as devastating as the illness itself, resulting in paranoia and anger that strained her relationship with her son. Olga and Zdenek eventually divorced and both returned to the Czech Republic after the fall of the Communist regime, adding a physical distance to the emotional one Mark often felt.
Much of this history inspired Slouka’s 2007 novel, The Visible World. The funny and weirdly appropriate thing is, I can remember exactly where I was when I read that book: my own relatively fragile state of mind, the fading sun on the front porch of an empty house in Coolville. And yet, I remember precious little about the novel itself. What happened, who the characters were, much of that is lost from my mind. It seems so fitting that Slouka’s memoir spurred those memories for me much the same as they did for him.
This meandering, at-times messy book is not for all readers. Slouka occasionally tried my patience as I waited for him to get to the point, set his sails on a direction, any direction. I trusted him primarily because Brewster had such a profound effect on me a few years ago. I’m glad I stuck with it, because it eventually coalesced into such a thoughtful look at the way that memory and fiction intertwine with one another. Don’t go into this necessarily hoping for clarity, but do trust that Slouka’s quest for peace and closure is a meaningful and, at time, inspiring one.
Slouka’s father died in late 2013. His mother, with whom he’d long had a strained and sometimes estranged relationship, was in the final stages of a dementia that had essentially wiped clean her memory of her only son. Feeling adrift, essentially an orphan, Slouka began to write about his hazy understanding of their stories in an attempt to make peace with his losses and to build a more complete mental picture of who his parents actually were.
This was not a particularly easy book to read because Slouka doesn’t write a linear narrative. It’s mostly broken down into small chunks, part filling in details he knows about his parents’ lives and part meditating on the concept of memory versus truth. It’s a very philosophical, very psychoanalytic memoir that I would describe as “a book for writers.” The sentences are lovely, the thoughts provocative, but whatever story he manages to present is often muddled. It’s not until perhaps the final third of the book that it really and truly started to gel for me, when he starts to present what he knows: his mother, Olga, was impregnated by her father, then quickly married off to Zdenek Slouka, a young man she’d known for a few weeks and the pregnancy terminated. After the Second World War ended and Communism took hold of their country, Zdenek grew involved in the resistance, became a target, and was forced to find a way out of the country with his new wife. They lived in refugee camps in Innsbruck, Austria, for a year and a half.
At Innsbruck, the two were separated out of necessity and Olga embarked on an affair with a man identified only as F. Olga and Zdenek managed to obtain entry to Australia for a time, eventually moving around to various homes around the United States--Queens, upstate, Bethlehem, PA. For much of this time, Olga considered F. her true love. They corresponded for a time, lost touch, tried and failed to find their way back to one another. Meanwhile, Mark was born and Olga descended into an unnamed mental illness that looks a lot like bipolar disorder. The side effects of her addictive medication were nearly as devastating as the illness itself, resulting in paranoia and anger that strained her relationship with her son. Olga and Zdenek eventually divorced and both returned to the Czech Republic after the fall of the Communist regime, adding a physical distance to the emotional one Mark often felt.
Much of this history inspired Slouka’s 2007 novel, The Visible World. The funny and weirdly appropriate thing is, I can remember exactly where I was when I read that book: my own relatively fragile state of mind, the fading sun on the front porch of an empty house in Coolville. And yet, I remember precious little about the novel itself. What happened, who the characters were, much of that is lost from my mind. It seems so fitting that Slouka’s memoir spurred those memories for me much the same as they did for him.
This meandering, at-times messy book is not for all readers. Slouka occasionally tried my patience as I waited for him to get to the point, set his sails on a direction, any direction. I trusted him primarily because Brewster had such a profound effect on me a few years ago. I’m glad I stuck with it, because it eventually coalesced into such a thoughtful look at the way that memory and fiction intertwine with one another. Don’t go into this necessarily hoping for clarity, but do trust that Slouka’s quest for peace and closure is a meaningful and, at time, inspiring one.
ixnsindhu's review against another edition
3.0
I wish I could have like this book better. I didn't completely finish it. It is so beautifully written. Unfortunately I could not follow any story line, kept getting confused and just gave up.
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