Nobody's Son
A Memoir
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
"I have never before read anything except Nabokov’s Speak, Memory that so relentlessly and shrewdly exhausted the kindness and cruelty of recollection’s shaping devices." —Geoffrey Wolff
Born in Czechoslovakia, Mark Slouka’s parents survived the Nazis only to have to 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 enigmatic 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
