The Glass Room
Simon Mawer, 2009
Little, Brown & Co.
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781590513965
Summary
Honeymooners 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. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1948
• Where—England (UK)
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—McKitterick Prize for First Novels; Boardman Tasker
Prize for Mountain Literature
• Currently—lives and teaches in Rome, Italy
Simon Mawer is a British author who currently lives in Italy.
Educated at Millfield School in Somerset and at Brasenose College, Oxford, Mawer took a degree in Zoology and has worked as a biology teacher for most of his life.
He published his first novel, Chimera, (1989) at the comparatively late age of thirty-nine. It won the McKitterick Prize for first novels. Mendel's Dwarf followed three works of modest success and established him as a writer of note on both sides of the Atlantic. The New York Times judged it one of the "books to remember" of 1998.
The Gospel of Judas and The Fall followed, with the latter winning the 2003 Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. More recently, he published Swimming to Ithaca, a novel partially inspired by his childhood on the island of Cyprus. A book called A Place in Italy (1992), written in the wake of A Year in Provence, recounts the first two years in the village in Italy he went to live in.
He has mounted one other foray into the field of non-fiction, Gregor Mendel: Planting the Seeds of Genetics, which was published in conjunction with the Field Museum of Chicago as a companion volume to the museum's current exhibition of the same name.
In 2009, Mawer published The Glass Room, a novel about a modernist villa built in a Czech city in 1928. Mawer has acknowledged that the book was primarily inspired by the Villa Tugendhat which was designed by architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and built in Brno in the Czech Republic in 1928-30. The novel was nominated for the 2009 Man Booker Prize.
Mawer has lived in Italy since 1977, teaching biology at St. George's British International School in Rome. He is married and has two children. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[A] stirring new novel...The Glass Room works so effectively because Mawer embeds…provocative aesthetic and moral issues in a war-torn adventure story that's eerily erotic and tremendously exciting.... Mawer, an Englishman living in Italy, has written this novel as though it were a translation, endowing his prose with a patina of Old World formality that sounds all the more romantic. He claims he doesn't know Czech or German, but his characters speak both fluently, and his attention to foreign languages enriches every episode.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
[The Glass Room is] a thing of extraordinary beauty and symmetry... a novel of ideas, yet strongly propelled by plot and characterised by an almost dreamlike simplicity of telling. Comparisons with the work of Michael Frayn would not be misplaced, and there are occasional moments of illuminating brilliance.
The Guardian (UK)
In Mawer's hands [The Glass Room] becomes a means for exploring the way people's hopes for the future become part of their history. This he does beautifully.
Times Literary Supplement (UK)
The Jewish fates of Viktor, Kata and others are lightly handled, which seems just right in this optimistic, joyful but never facile vision of human achievement. Mawer's perfect pacing clinches a wholly enjoyable and moving read.
The Independent (UK)
The Glass Room['s] poetic success is to remind us of two great gilt-edged ironies: that whatever is held to be the height of modernity is already en route to the museum, and that even 'cold' art is the embodiment of its maker's passion—one that can prove contagious.
Financial Times (UK)
Simon Mawer's grasp of period and place achieves what all great novels must: the creation of an utterly absorbing world the reader can scarcely bear to leave. Exciting, profoundly affecting and altogether wonderful.
Daily Mail (UK)
Engrossing.... Mawer explores his themes with a subtle intelligence. A novel of ideas, but one driven by character and story.
Literary Review
The writing, as sensual and sophisticated as its subjects, keeps us firmly within the house's elegant parameters, caught up in the touch and taste and roiling emotions of the characters living through these events. Seeing clearly, Mawer shows us, is never an option, no matter how large and expensive your windows. Every era thinks it has achieved transparency, complete with modern fixtures and sundry decorations. But we can't ever actually see out, because our damned humanity keeps misting up the glass.
Time Out London
The latest from novelist Mawer (The Fall) begins with great promise, as Jewish newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer meet with architect Rainier von Abt, not just an architect but "a poet...of light and space and form," who builds their dream home, a "modern house...adapted to the future rather than the past, to the openness of modern living." World events, however, are about to overtake 1930s Czechoslovakia. Viktor, like most in the community, dismisses rumors of impending pogroms-"The only people who hold the German economy together are the Jews"—but once the signs of Nazi occupation become impossible to ignore, the Landauers must abandon their beloved home. In a bizarre twist of fate, however, Liesel insists on rescuing single mother Katra, unaware that Katra is Viktor's new mistress. As the world spins into chaos, the highly symbolic Landauer house is the only constant; though it shifts identities more than once, the house remains "ageless," a place "that defines the very existence of time." Mawer's writing and characters are rich, but his twisty plot depends too often on unbelievable coincidences, especially in the conclusion.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. Why are the Landauers so devoted to modernity? What makes them so intent on shedding the past, and how is this tied to their country's history or future?
2. What was your first impression of Rainer von Abt? What did you think of his minimalist approach? Why do you think it appealed to Liesel and Viktor?
3. The characters are constantly fluctuating between languages-specifically German and Czech. How do these characters use or manipulate language to express themselves?
4. During the housewarming party at the Glass Room, von Abt speaks of his masterpiece, saying, "A work of art like this demands that the life lived in it be a work of art as well." Do you think this prophecy comes to fruition?
5. Why does Viktor initially approach Kata in Vienna? What is he looking for in her? How is she different from Liesel?
6. The Glass Room takes on many personas throughout the book, moving from a home to a laboratory to a gymnasium to a museum. Does the original concept of the house remain intact through all of its internal transformations? Does the house ever become part of the past?
7. Do you believe that Viktor is in love with both Liesel and Kata? Does he fall for Kata before or after she comes to live with the family? What does the scene at the train station reveal about both him and Liesel?
8. Coincidence plays an important role in the novel. Does the Glass Room encourage it? If so, how?
9. Why do you think Hana agrees to be examined by Stahl and his crew? Why do you think the house is seen as an ideal place for a scientific laboratory?
10. What image or scene within the novel haunted or stayed with you the most?
11. Tomas, much like Viktor, is always looking toward the future. But with yet another love triangle in the Glass Room—this time between Zdenka, Tomas, and Eve—do things really change in this society obsessed with the future? Can history be erased if it is constantly being repeated?
12. What is Hana searching for in all of her love affairs? Do you think she is truly in love with Zdenka? Is it the Glass Room's influence or is Zdenka just a replacement for Liesel?
13. When Hana and Liesel are reunited at the novel's end, both women gloss over the tragedies in their past. Why do you think they hold back?
14. Does The Glass Room tell the story of a house or a family? What story do you think Mawer set out to tell?
15. Mawer constantly shifts the perspective from character to character, often leaving the reader wanting more. Which character's outcome or emotions did you wish you knew more about by the novel's end-Katalin's? Von Abt's? Viktor's? Stahl's? Oskar's?
16. Why do you think Mawer chose to conclude the book with Ottilie and Maria reuniting? What, if anything, does this new generation represent?
(Questions issued by publisher.)