Nobody's Son
A Memoir
by Mark Slouka
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Pub Date Oct 18 2016 | Archive Date Sep 30 2016
Description
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.
Advance Praise
“Mark Slouka's Nobody’s Son is a masterwork of memoir. The writing is breathtaking, astonishingly fierce yet powerfully lyric. The story moves beyond the search for a self into the tangled narratives of both private memory and the ravaged history of 20th century Central Europe.” - Patricia Hampl, author of The Florist's Daughter
“This is a remarkable story remarkably told. It is commonplace for writers of family memories to punch candor’s time clock by conceding memory’s dirty tricks, memory’s unreliability, memory’s narrative shortcuts and deletions and amendments. But 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, author of Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father
“Somber, funny, ruthless, tender, this singular memoir reverberates with obstinate, refreshing candor.” - Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait Inside My Head
“The profoundest stories are about family, and the best memoirs are about memory; both human ties and human memory are deceptive, mysterious, recursive, contradictory. Slouka’s previous writing has shown that he has both a hard skeptical brain and a huge questing heart. Nobody's Son is the book of his life, in both senses: he sings it like Bach throwing his baton, a mature master engaged, enamored, enraged.” - Brian Hall, author of Fall of Frost
“In Nobody’s Son Mark Slouka softens neither the events he’s recalling nor his own struggle, sentence by sentence, to register them as truly as he can. Paradoxically, they’ve yielded a thing of beauty.” - David Gates, author of A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me
“Mark Slouka's superb memoir should become a classic. His account of his Czech parents' postwar flight from their country and troubled life in the US has a 'stranger than fiction' plot, with all the elements of tragedy and suspense, war and exile, sexual trauma and madness. Nobody's Son is a heart-wrenching tale of the demise of a family, told with the hard-won honesty and insight of a genuine artist. I was enthralled from start to finish.” - Lynne Sharon Schwartz, author of This Is Where We Came In
“This is a remarkable story remarkably told. It is commonplace for writers of family memories to punch candor’s time clock by conceding memory’s dirty tricks, memory’s unreliability, memory’s narrative shortcuts and deletions and amendments. But 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, author of Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father
“Somber, funny, ruthless, tender, this singular memoir reverberates with obstinate, refreshing candor.” - Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait Inside My Head
“The profoundest stories are about family, and the best memoirs are about memory; both human ties and human memory are deceptive, mysterious, recursive, contradictory. Slouka’s previous writing has shown that he has both a hard skeptical brain and a huge questing heart. Nobody's Son is the book of his life, in both senses: he sings it like Bach throwing his baton, a mature master engaged, enamored, enraged.” - Brian Hall, author of Fall of Frost
“In Nobody’s Son Mark Slouka softens neither the events he’s recalling nor his own struggle, sentence by sentence, to register them as truly as he can. Paradoxically, they’ve yielded a thing of beauty.” - David Gates, author of A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me
“Mark Slouka's superb memoir should become a classic. His account of his Czech parents' postwar flight from their country and troubled life in the US has a 'stranger than fiction' plot, with all the elements of tragedy and suspense, war and exile, sexual trauma and madness. Nobody's Son is a heart-wrenching tale of the demise of a family, told with the hard-won honesty and insight of a genuine artist. I was enthralled from start to finish.” - Lynne Sharon Schwartz, author of This Is Where We Came In
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780393292305 |
| PRICE | $26.95 (USD) |
