Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
elegiac, restrained and resonant, 13 April 2008
This book has had quite mixed reviews that fall into the either very high or very low and I think that's an accurate estimate of how any individual reader will respond. I have to say that I think it's an odd choice for R&J because they tend to choose the obvious 'good reads' that are fairly superficial and, in my opinion, instantly forgettable. This, however, is neither.
As another reviwer here has said, the wartime love story genre usually tends to be full of over-ripe emotions, and (soap) operatic story-lines - this isn't. It's an immensely subtle, elegiac and emotionally-restrained tale of a man's search for a past.
In three parts, the first part is a memoir of an unnamed narrator growing up with Czech emigrant parents in New York. This is both charming and dark with shadows that will stretch into the future.
The second part is a brief intermezzo which takes him to Prague as an adult where he meets various veterans of the war who tell a variety of stories that intersect with, but are not, the story of his parents.
The third part, called a novel, is the narrator's fictional imaginging of what might have been his mother's story and her love for a man who wasn't his father, set in the tense years of 1942.
For a relatively short book (250 pages) this touches all kinds of important themes: the fragility of identity, the extent to which we ever 'know' anyone, even the people closest to us, memory and the fictionalision of our own lives, love, idealism, death.
It's not a strightforward linear narrative which might be one the things that some readers have found problematic, but that is itself one of the themes of the book: the way the past and present are mosaics that shift to tell different stories depending on our own perspective.
Overall I found this is moving book written in confident sometimes poetic but always unpretentious prose that is all the more moving for its very emotional restraint. I started it yesterday afternoon and finished it by midnight. A strong recommendation.
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23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
great read and a stunning, rememorable love story, 7 Mar 2008
Thank goodness for Richard and Judy, I read but I would never have picked up this book if not for them.
Yes, the first half is a little slow but do stick with it, the love story that is the second half is amazing. I read other reviews and was slightly put off by comments on the beautiful prose and great writing, books like this I tend to find hard going and too wordy. This is not one of them. For anyone who has loved and lost or been in a one-sided relationship, read this. Also, the writing describes so well, you can imagine being there, you can see the places visited so clearly in your head that they exist and you feel the pain/love/loss so well that you feel empty when you finish.
Great.
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60 of 67 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
I wanted to love this book, but it left me wanting, 10 Feb 2008
I came to this book through the Richard & Judy bookclub. Admittedly, it is probably a book I never would have picked up to read otherwise, had it not on their list. But, as I read other reviews for it on Amazon before turning to it, I became quite eager to begin its journey. The positive feedback suggested that it was an engrossing love story, set against the turmoil of war. On the back cover, a couple of sentences from the novel itself also piqued my interest:-
"My mother knew a man during the war. Theirs was a love story, and like any good love story, it left blood on the floor and wreckage in its wake."
However, upon beginning THE VISIBLE WORLD, I slowly began to lose interest.
The book begins with the narrator discussing his early life. His family are Czech, and his homeland seems vague and distant to him - just as the past can so often be. His memory is fragmentary, but there is one issue that seems to hold everything together - that his mother loved another man before she married his father. As you read the first part of the book, you get the sense that he is desperately trying to undertsand his family's history; not just their personal history but also their history in terms of race and culture, and the effects that the war had on them. The second part of the book is the love story - the stroy about his mother and the man that she loved.
Writing this review now, I am quite torn between wanting to express how poignant this book can be and between a sense of disappontment. What I loved about it was how Slouka was able to explore the idea of family members being strangers to those they live with - how circumstances like a World War can make people do extraordinary things; for themselves and their country.
My disappointment comes from my expectations not being met. I think the first part of the book failed to keep my interest enough for me to really care about the love story part. THE VISIBLE WORLD is a slow developer, so
I cannot truly say that it gripped without letting go.
Perhaps my expectations were too high and I was bound to be disappointed. Maybe Slouka's writing style simply does not work for me.
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