Fiction with a Capital H
PW Talks with Mark Slouka
by Michael Scharf -- Publishers Weekly, 2/19/2007
Slouka's latest novel, The Visible World (Reviews, Dec. 4), draws on dramatic WWII history to make sense of a mother's suicide.
You use a real event, a vivid account of a Nazi commandant's assassination, to resolve the story of a very grim postwar American émigré marriage. How did you decide to put them together?
I'm fascinated by the ways that history and story play against each other. I was a child of refugees, and part of what I inherited were silences. There were gaps in my parents' marriage, stories that didn't quite cohere. The story of Reinhard Heydrich's assassination is inherently dramatic: he was the only high-ranking official assassinated during the entirety of WWII, and it was done, basically, by some boys. To me it's a story of naked heroism, and I was drawn to it. And so what I've done, I think, through fiction, is try to complete the gaps in my personal story with capital H History.
How close is the narrator's story to your own?
Well, my father really was in the Czech resistance; my mother really did have a lifelong love. I needed to imagine a story for them that would make sense to me, very much like the narrator of the novel does.
Thus fiction rather than memoir.
Obviously, I'm playing with genre.
I grew up on the fault line between histories, between generations, between languages. The novel, I think, draws on all of them to make sense of the bits and pieces of inconclusive stuff from the narrator's childhood.
It's almost like this book picks up from where your story collection, Lost Lake [which centers on a Czech émigré community] left off.
I think it's Milan Kundera who says that we write the same book over and over again. I hope it's not quite that literal in this case [laughter]. I did write a book about Siamese twins born in 1811 [God's Fool, 2002], but it begins with one version of the story and ends with another. The centripetal pull is too big; you're going to wind up writing about the things that haunt you no matter what. Lost Lake was full of the tension between the Old World and the New, between the stories that people tell and the truth they may have lived, and here I am again. I can't run away from it.
