Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed,

or you are the only animal,

who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW, Santa Monica, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm. Today, I'm very pleased

to have as my guest, Mark Slocca, whose most recent book, The Visible World, a novel, has been

published by Houghton Mifflin.

His earlier books are Lost Lake, which is a book of short stories, and a novel, God's Fool.

Now, from the very beginning, Mark Slocke's work has been asking the question, what is a story?

And if so, what is history? And if that, what is an anecdote?

What is a dream? What is a memory? And this new book, The Visible World, brings together these themes in their most beautiful articulation.

It's narrated by a man who was once, as were we all, a young boy,

who, following the death of his mother, realizes that what he's known of her has had a mysterious X in the middle,

an absence, something that made her moody or sad or evasive, eventually led her to hide in her bedroom,

and after her death he realizes that he will have

to stop writing the memoir of his family and his mother and go into life, go to Czechoslovakia

where the family came from, but more than that, he will have to invent a story

in order to tell us the thing we so often want to know about our parents.

Why did they love each other as much as they did, and why didn't they love each other more? And this is a

mystery at the heart of which the narrator's life has been waiting. Now, I thought I'd begin

by asking you. The book is divided between a memoir and intermission

...