The Visible World

In his evocative reading, Glen McCready accomplishes the narrative equivalent of a sepia-toned photograph. At once he conveys a sense that we are in a time and place soaked in sorrows--first, Czechoslovakia during the war, then, New York in the decade or two afterwards. But he also captures an immediacy that renders the conflicting emotions of love astonishingly vivid and present. Slouka's tricky novel begins with a young narrator, the son of Czech émigrés, recalling the suicide of his mother. This mystery eventually leads him to Prague and his attempt to unearth the wartime events that would doom his mother to her self-destruction. With a hushed, ever-restrained reading, McCready delivers a shattering listening experience. M.O. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

December 4, 2006
Slouka's urgent second novel (following God's Fool
) comes in three parts. The first relates the nameless narrator's growing up in postwar New York and Pennsylvania as the child of college journalism instructor Antonín and Ivana Sedlák, Czech émigrés whose marriage is slowly disintegrating. The reason, of which the young narrator is aware from an early age, is that Ivana loves another man, killed in Czechoslovakia during WWII. The despondent Ivana watches soap operas and chain-smokes until, at age 64 in 1984, she walks in front of the Allentown bus. The slimmer middle section chronicles the narrator quitting his job two years later, moving to Prague and poking into his parents' wartime past there. The final, longest section crackles with the novel's main tale. Having pieced together enough of his parents' history, the narrator "imagines" the rest. Crucially, it involves the actual assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, Hitler's ruthless local military governor, on May 27, 1942. As part of a daring plan, Czech patriot assassins are parachuted in by the RAF; the injured Heydrich later dies of blood poisoning. The Nazi bloodbath that follows includes the infamous liquidation of the village of Lidice. The suspense is well paced, and the action scenes are vividly recounted. Slouka's novel has a poignant verve.