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    Nobody's Son: A Memoir
    Nobody's Son: A Memoir
    Nobody's Son: A Memoir
    Audiobook6 hours

    Nobody's Son: A Memoir

    Written by Mark Slouka

    Narrated by Tom Zingarelli

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Born in Czechoslovakia, Mark Slouka's parents survived the Nazis only to be forced to then 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 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateOct 28, 2016
    ISBN9781681683294
    Nobody's Son: A Memoir

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    Reviews for Nobody's Son

    3.5/5

    8 ratings3 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This memoir made for frustrating - interesting, but still frustrating - reading. The author warns early on that this work is nonlinear and I wondered as I read if that was really necessary. The story might have made more sense if it unfolded linearly. The tale is definitely interesting, featuring a mother struggling with mental illness and addiction, a family living through Nazi occupation and then a Soviet takeover, and a forbidden love affair. Still, I finished this book with a sense of relief that it was over and I had made it to the end. It's an interesting read, but it's just not for me.
    • 4/5
      "I'm not making any claim to anything------ this isn't Queen for a Day. I have no interest in hustling our unhappiness for a bit of misery cred and a shot at Oprah. What I'm interested in is at once more selfish and less sellable. I want to know what the f**k happened toms, and why, I couldn't see it. I want to know why I couldn't save us, though what I really want, I think is absolution, the beginning of this sentence, with the word "why" removed like a long thorn: I want to know I couldn't save us."This quote actually come quite late in the book but I feel that it encompasses what he tries soHard to do here, states it quite clearly. Trying to understand why the mother who loved him so much as a child, turned on him, almost seemed to hate him as he hit his preteen years. Like memory, this book goes back and forth, triggered by some remembrance he attempts to track down the meaning. Follows his parents lives together, his mother's past, trying so hard to understand.Of course as a child he had no clear knowledge of some of the things he found out as an adult when he started searching.Powerfully written, he tells of his attempt to relate some of his thoughts, his questions in the fiction he has written. I read his novel Brewster, a few years back, was a five star read for me, and after reading this have a better understanding of what he wrote in that book. Not an easy book to read, it is quite grim, desperate at times, but it is an honest read, a memorable one.
    • 3/5
      A memoir about a family with issues. I am talking abut Pat Conroy type issues but the book is written without the Conroy wit and humor. So that fact makes the memoir ultimately just depressing. The focal point are the author's relationships with his mother, father and to some extent his extended family. The family escapes political oppression in Eastern Europe but never finds happiness elsewhere. I think that these people would have been dysfunctional no matter where they lived - location was immaterial. There are happy adjusted people in this world but I fear that the author and his family were doomed to their own private Hell.