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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.

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One thought on "Books: The Glass Room"

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    April 16, 2011 at 1:46 pm

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