The Glass Room
by Simon Mawer
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Book Summary Information
Author: Simon MawerEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-10-20
ISBN: 1590513967
Number of pages: 406
Publisher: Other Press
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9781590513965
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Glass Room
Book Review: Beauty, fragility, transparency, and war
Summary: 5 Stars
This was the first Simon Mawer novel I've read, and I'm very glad to have bee introduced to his work. This book impresses me with its wonderfully three dimensional characters, its compelling plot, and the way it is informed by history--and makes it clear that life is shaped by history, and no one is immune to its forces--without being a simple historical novel. _The Glass Room_ is a work of fiction, but the house at its center is not: it is Tugendhat House by Mies van der Rohe, here called The Landauer House or Der Glasraum by Rainer von Abt. The house is a modernist experiment, with the main living area a glass enclosed open space room. Von Abt aims not to construct a house but to "create a work of art. A work that is the very reverse of sculpture: I wish to enclose a space'" (21).
The family who lives in this house is the wealthy Landauer family: Viktor, Liesel, and their children, Ottilie and Martin. Part of what makes this book so compelling is the complexity of the characters. Viktor is a successful businessman, the head of a company that designs and manufacturers Landauer cars. He cares deeply about the latest developments in architecture and the arts, and is pleased to hire von Abt to design a living space for his growing family. At the beginning of the novel, they seem to represent all that is hopeful and modern in The Republic of Czechoslovakia. He is a Jew married to a gentile, and they surround themselves with a group of advanced friends accomplished and interested in the arts and sciences. Yet like their glass enclosed house, and like the political future of their infant nation, their relationship is fragile.
Viktor almost thoughtless stumbles in what could have just been a one night stand, but becomes a passionate affair with a Viennese woman, Kata. The novel does not, however, paint him as a villian or a particularly selfish individual, but an imperfect and complex one. Though on the day of his housewarming, Viktor says that their home "says who Liesel and I are....In our wonderful glass house you can see everything" (76), the truth is that Viktor, like all the characters in the novel, has things he would prefer to keep secret. And Viktor's affair is only one of the clouds potentially disturbing their halcyon existence. Storm clouds are also gathering over Europe, as Hitler's reach extends and it becomes increasingly clear to Viktor that they have to leave their modern masterpiece of a home in The Republic of Czechoslovakia (a conclusion his wife and some of their friends resist) for Switzerland, and, eventually, leave Switzerland as well.
The novel follows not only the fate of the Landauer family and that of Kata and her daughter Marika, but also that of the house, whose fate during the Nazi occupation takes some perverse twists and turns, becoming a place of ominous scientific experimentation and violence in one incarnation, and of beneficent therapy in another. The book opens with an elderly Liesel Landauer returning to Der Glasraum before flashing back to the early days of her marriage. Watching Mawer unfold the history of this place and this family highlights the beauty, fragility, and complexity of human life, and the impossibility of living a truly transparent existence.
Summary of The Glass Room
A New York Times Best-SellerHoneymooners Viktor and Liesel Landauer are filled with the optimism and cultural vibrancy of central Europe of the 1920s when they meet modernist architect Rainer von Abt. He builds for them a home to embody their exuberant faith in the future, and the Landauer House becomes an instant masterpiece. Viktor and Liesel, a rich Jewish mogul married to a thoughtful, modern gentile, pour all of their hopes for their marriage and budding family into their stunning new home, filling it with children, friends, and a generation of artists and thinkers eager to abandon old-world European style in favor of the new and the avant-garde. But as life intervenes, their new home also brings out their most passionate desires and darkest secrets. As Viktor searches for a warmer, less challenging comfort in the arms of another woman, and Liesel turns to her wild, mischievous friend Hana for excitement, the marriage begins to show signs of strain. The radiant honesty and idealism of 1930 quickly evaporate beneath the storm clouds of World War II. As Nazi troops enter the country, the family must leave their old life behind and attempt to escape to America before Viktor's Jewish roots draw Nazi attention, and before the family itself dissolves.
As the Landauers struggle for survival abroad, their home slips from hand to hand, from Czech to Nazi to Soviet possession and finally back to the Czechoslovak state, with new inhabitants always falling under the fervent and unrelenting influence of the Glass Room. Its crystalline perfection exerts a gravitational pull on those who know it, inspiring them, freeing them, calling them back, until the Landauers themselves are finally drawn home to where their story began.
Brimming with barely contained passion and cruelty, the precision of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession, and the fear of failure - the Glass Room contains it all.
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