Lost Lake: Stories

"Some say the soul tempered by fire--tortured true--is the better for the trial. Perhaps it is so. But I was born between the wars," writes the narrator of this collection's opening story, "The Shape of Water." "My adventures were of the survivable kind, my tragedies ambiguous and undramatic, observed as much as felt. What formed me were anecdotes--often inconclusive, generally unheroic--connected to a particular forty acres of water. An unexceptional place. I did not choose it. And yet, if I could ever open myself, I suspect I'd find its coves there, its sleeping silt, its placental water smooth with algae ... and the faces of those I'd known revealed as clearly as if mine had been that lake of legend said to reflect the human heart."

It's an extraordinary image, and one that aptly sums up the project of this dazzling debut collection. Throughout Lost Lake, Slouka invests everyday events with an almost numinous glow. Catching fish; cleaning them; practicing knots; telling stories: these actions are windows opening onto unimaginable darkness--soldiers hanged along an avenue of cherry trees, decapitated snapping turtles crawling past their own heads, a dead baby wrapped in "the warm cave" of a coat. Ostensibly, these stories take place among a small Czech community settled on the shores of New York's Lost Lake, but they ripple outward to encompass the world. No exalted feat of nature, Lost Lake is a landscape both humble and utterly human, as we discover in "Creation," in which a dreamy farmer looks out over a cow pasture and pictures the fishing hole he will make. Nonetheless, it's still privy to the most elemental of dramas, from death ("Equinox") to adulterous love ("The Exile"). The short story is a miniaturist's art, and its success depends on a writer's ability to compress everything most essential about life--memory, guilt, sorrow, love, fishing--to fit within its brief pages. Slouka is a master. Reading Lost Lake elicits the same wonder as holding water up to a microscope for the first time: there it is, life, teeming, abundant, and true. --Mary Park