Summary
Summary
Born in Czechoslovakia, Mark Slouka's parents survived the Nazis only to be forced to then escape the Communist purges after the war. Smuggled out of their own country, the newlyweds joined a tide of refugees moving from Innsbruck to Sydney to New York, dragging with them a history of blood and betrayal that their son would be born into. From World War I to the present, Slouka pieces together a remarkable story of refugees and war, displacement and denial, admitting into evidence memories, dreams, stories, the lies we inherit and the lies we tell-in an attempt to reach his mother, the figure at the center of the labyrinth. Her story-the revelation of her life-long burden and the forty-year love affair that might have saved her-shows the way out of the maze.
Author Notes
Mark Slouka is a graduate of Columbia University and he has taught at Harvard and the University of California at San Diego. He currently teaches at Columbia and lives in New York City with his wife and children.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Madness, war, persecution, and suburban anomie warp a family in this sometimes grim, sometimes luminous memoir. Novelist Slouka (Brewster) is the son of Czechs who survived wartime German occupation, then fled the Communist regime to settle in the U.S., where they languished in the cultural wasteland of their Bethlehem, Pa., subdivision. Slouka's parents' epically bad marriage was dominated by the deepening mental illness of his mother, Olga, which featured paranoid delusions, shrieking rages over trivialities, and worse. Slouka foregrounds his claustrophobic relationship with Olga as it shifted from sunny warmth to hurricane-strength hatred and then, after decades, to a distance that gives insight into her polarities. (He suggests that she was molested by her father in her youth.) Slouka's reminiscences of his childhood are vivid and novelistic, but sometimes they become bogged down in ruminations on the fallibility of memory and middle-class American family dysfunctions he witnessed. The book shines when he imagines his parents' more compelling travails in the 1940s, supplemented by his own travel to Czechoslovakia in the 1970s, where he discovered a hidden romance that's the key to Olga's character. In the end, he manages to recover deep personal meaning from tragic history. Photos. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Novelist (Brewster, 2013) and essayist Slouka's parents survived the Nazis and WWII, escaped their native Czechoslovakia during the postwar communist regime, and became displaced persons as newlyweds. As refugees, they shuffled from Austria to Australia and finally to America, dragging little material but great emotional baggage with them every step of the way. At times brutally honest, at others sweetly mournful, Slouka's anguished memoir of his life as their only child delves intrepidly into the mysteries of their past that haunted them then and him still: his mother's sexual abuse at the hands of her own father, her decades-long adulterous affair, hidden addictions, and barely contained bipolar disorder. With starkly vivid imagery and an elegiac, dreamlike cadence, Slouka conveys the precariousness of a childhood spent never knowing what aspect of his mother's volatile personality he'd have to confront nor understanding what precipitated her mercurial rages. Slouka has admirably covered these themes in his novels, but, as always, fiction pales compared to reality.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2016 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Slouka (Brewster) faces the legacy of his Czechoslovakian refugee parents, particularly his mother. An incredible figure, she is at times deeply caring and compassionate, and at other times astonishingly callous, obsessive, and even despicable in her treatment of her son and husband. In what seems to be a growing trend in recent memoirs, the author explores the nature of memory and how we shape and are shaped by it. VERDICT This astounding work is bound to be a classic of the genre. [See Memoir, 9/13/16; ow.ly/ATsS304zVCP.]-DS © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.