THE VISIBLE WORLD by Mark Slouka

An excerpt from Mark Slouka's latest novel, published this spring:

When I was a boy we lived in a fifteenth-floor apartment in Queens, like an aerie above the world, and at night my father would read to me from a thick yellow volume of Czech fairy tales. In the book was…a picture of a beautiful girl in a dark forest. She had thin arms and she wore a white dress like one of my mother’s scarves. She was leaning back against the trunk of a huge, mossed tree as though trying to protect it, a hunter’s arrow buried deep in her breast. I would look at that picture when I was alone. At the thin fingers of her left hand splayed like a starfish, grasping the bark.…There was a look on her face, caught between the strands of black, blowing hair, that I found shameful and disturbing and mysterious.
I could never look at it for long. A look of shock, of course. And pain, yes. But something else, something I could not understand then—can barely understand now. A look of pleading, of utter renunciation, of love. Of love beyond all song andargument.

No one could tell you about my father without first telling you
something about her. …

For twenty-six years, Antonín Sedlák was like every other
mother’s son in the city of Brno, Czechoslovakia—four rows up,
three over—running his own particular course to the sea. Then
he ran into her, and nothing was ever the same for him again.
What can I say about my father that isn’t bent out of truth by
hindsight, misshapen by love? My father was a good and decent
man, I think, a man capable of outrage over the world he happened
to have found himself in, but someone whose faith in reason,
like some men’s faith in God or love, remained intact long after his life had made it ridiculous… Everything that he accomplished in his life was a violence against that almost-smile. Against its generosity, its good-humored reasonableness and decency. Against his very nature. And that, too, the smile seems to anticipate, and accept for the irony it is.

Mark Slouka on NPR