The Visible World Book

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".