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Books: The Glass Room

Finishing her umpteenth young-adult novel set during World War II, my ten-year old daughter pranced around the kitchen: “I llllllove the Holocaust.”

I choked on my coffee. “You mean, the literature of the Holocaust. Hitler, the Nazis. The ultimate bad guys.”

Alex agreed, then told me all about a Danish girl sent by her grandmother to deliver a message hidden inside a picnic basket, through Nazi lines! A young girl! Outwitting the soldiers!

Which made me think: do we need even one more book, movie, play, opera about the Holocaust?41hibgudbfl_sl75_

Yes. Simon Mawer’s “The Glass Room”, a 2009 finalist for the Man Booker Prize, is a magnificent addition to the canon.

Though its focus is a glass house — a fictional stand in for the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, designed by Mies Van der Rhoe — Mawer gives us the story of its owners, Viktor and Liesel Landauer. They marry, honeymoon, build and furnish the glass house, create a family, flirt, cheat, and with the Nazis bearing down, abandon the spectacular house, fleeing Czechoslovakia for the U.S., via Cuba. (Viktor is a Jew.)

The house is glass and steel, with a luminous onyx wall, open and airy, a completed work of art. But its inhabitants grow and change in surprising ways. The Landauers are fabulous, and flawed. They’re fully alive. Indeed, the story suffers when the action moves away from the Landauers, back to the glass house, where it is used as a genetic research center by the Nazis, and later, under Soviet rule, a gymnasium for children weakened by polio.

“The Glass Room” is leisurely told, spanning six decades. We see Vienna, as well as the mid-size metropolis where the glass house is situated, change from sophisticated, glittery cities into dreary, worn places. Minor characters age, suffer, change. A socialite prostitutes herself to a Nazi officer, to survive and to curry favor for her Jewish husband. A chore boy thrives under the multiple occupations, running a black market from the garage beside the glass house.

The book’s ending, also at the glass house, is strained, not believable.

The great pleasure of this book is watching a marriage survive misunderstandings, boredom, infidelity, exile. It is a lovely, lively, full-bodied read. Even with Nazis.

Also in the blog

Dan Chaon’s “Await Your Reply” (2009) is a beautifully told and highly compelling tale about identity: losing one, stealing others, gaining another (and another, and another). It’s rare that I finish a book and want to start reading it again, to figure out how the author pulled off such a clever feat of storytelling. This

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I read all the time but there’s one place on earth I read most: Club Lac Pythonga in Quebec. My husband’s family has had a summer home there since the 1960’s. It’s a magical place deep in the woods, cut off from the Internet, cell phones, newspapers, cars. A central kitchen serves family dinners, freeing

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Some books should be sold shrink-wrapped with a box of tissues. Or two. That would be Jojo Moyes’ “Me Before You,” which brings new meaning to book grief. Louisa Clark is 27 and newly unemployed in an English tourist town where there aren’t a lot options. She’s not educated or worldly. She lives at home

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