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| Title | : | The Glass Room |
| Author | : | Simon Mawer |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | Special Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 405 pages |
| Published | : | February 1st 2009 by Little Brown and Company (first published 2009) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Historical. Historical Fiction. War. Architecture |
Simon Mawer
Paperback | Pages: 405 pages Rating: 3.9 | 9981 Users | 1177 Reviews
Narrative To Books The Glass Room
O dear. A difficult one to rate. Another book which I suspect will get me slightly into trouble when discussing this in the next meeting of my real life reading group – in that sense reminding me of what happened when we did read The Invisible Bridge last year. Seeing many readers liked this book, again it must be me. This time the biggest chunk of the novel is not set in Budapest but in the Czechoslovakian city of Brno (Město (‘Place’) in the novel) more specifically revolving around a modernist villa – the (still existing) Villa Tugendhat) – which is transformed into the villa of the fictional family Landauer in the novel – designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (‘Rainer von Abt’ in the novel). Maybe typically for historical fiction – I am not sure as not having read much in the genre – the novel mixes fact and fiction, for instance mentioning real facts from Mies van der Rohe’s life, like his departure to the US in 1938, or by introducing the Czech composer Vítězslava Kaprálová as a character, while other elements are entirely fictional (the real commissioners of the building were both Jewish and active in the textile industry (wool) and trade, while the family Landauer at the core of the novel got wealthy by car manufacturing, father Viktor is Jewish but mother Liesel is not). Spanning the interbellum years, the Nazi occupation, the communist period until its current destination as a museum, the house and its subsequent functions structure the plot over sixty years, as a place bringing the characters together over a few generations.
The Glass Room with the onyx wall in the thirties
What struck me in this novel? Rather flat, cardboard characters tied up by superficial relationships; clumsily written erotic scenes [I lost count of the descriptions of nipples, genitals likened to mushrooms, body orifices and scenes like ‘She moves her legs apart. The scent is almost overwhelming (…). Hesitantly he tastes the strange flavours, the dark mystery of the Slavic Scham, the shame that is always there, the bearded mouth that seems, even as he kisses it, to poke its insolent tongue out’ (ok, I admit this is the evocation of the experience of a Nazi scientist character fixated on purity!); I guess the reader’s appreciation of many of similar detailed descriptions is a matter of personal taste (ahum), though it amuses me Mawer’s writing on desire and sex was praised in that respect to be unlike traditional British writing on the subject, while to me it came across as pretty old-fashioned). Some of these passages and particularly the repetitiveness of it are that burlesque/silly they appear like a parody despite the deep seriousness of the book; less funny I thought the author seems to project the most clichéd male fantasies and gender caricatures on his characters (Sapphic tendencies popping up in long-time friendships when the women discover their husband’s/lover’s infidelity; suggesting it is the spouse’s refusal of oral sex that drives her husband into the arms of a prostitute…)]; careless mentioning of ‘conversations on art and music’, this all larded with German and Czech expressions and words (to paint the authentic feel of the cultural amalgam central Europe was?); the (inevitable?) story background of WWII and the Holocaust – and evidently numerous descriptions on the interior of the villa and especially that titular glass room with the onyx wall in it, symbolising freedom, ratio and transparency embodying the life of the commissioners and all secrets and lies that will be revealed in the room – which after a while turned fairly repetitive, slogging through the same scenes ad nauseam in which we are supposed to marvel at the particular impressive breaking of the light, followed by another ode on glass, chrome, linoleum, concrete and whiteness.
On the plus side, the novel is, despite its volume and the weight of the historical background, a quick and remarkably breezy read that doesn’t eat up that much of one’s time or heart – a reassuringly moderate dose of casualties striking the protagonists. Maybe I am simply too cynical to sympathize with what seem to me the crazy rich people issues of the central couple of the novel – how outrageous they don’t have restaurant car in the Swiss train bringing them to Spain! Mama, the milk turned sour! – exile is a gruesome fate, evidently, but depicting exile in this incredible luxuriant conditions renders it into a kind of suffering hard to empathize with bearing in mind the plight of the ones who couldn’t escape so easily. Probably lovers of historical fiction or architecture buffs will get more out of this, but an overdose of (unintentionally) laughable scenes (the dance scenes of Zdenka!) made it hard for me to consider ‘The Glass Room’ a work that surpasses the guilty pleasure of browsing through the glossy pages of a lifestyle magazine.
Present Books Concering The Glass Room
| Original Title: | The Glass Room |
| ISBN: | 1408700778 (ISBN13: 9781408700778) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Characters: | Viktor Landauer, Liesel Landauer |
| Literary Awards: | Booker Prize Nominee (2009), Exclusive Books Boeke Prize Nominee (2011), European Book Prize Nominee for Fiction (2012), Walter Scott Prize Nominee (2010), Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize Nominee (2010) |
Rating Based On Books The Glass Room
Ratings: 3.9 From 9981 Users | 1177 ReviewsWeigh Up Based On Books The Glass Room
This book wowed me. There are numerous books about the plight of Jews in Nazi dominated Europe, but this novel takes a new angle. The Landauer House was built in Czechoslovakia in the early 1900s by a revolutionary architect, and it is this house which the novel is constructed around. Each character that lives or visits is connected to the house and their stories are played out inside its walls. As well as characters, the history and events leading up to and post holocaust are contained within.In the 1920's, wealthy, Jewish Czech businessman Viktor Landauer and his bride, Liesel, hire German avantgarde architect, Rainer von Abt, to design an ultra-modern home for them. An unconventional "upside down" blueprint creates space from a house, rather than creating a house from space. Von Abt considers himself a poet of form, space, and light. These revolutionary ideas usurp the notion of ornamentation. Gables, pillars, columns, turrets, and whatnot are oppressively rooted in the past, and
Seriously? Booker Prize? Why?This is so awfully average that I feel rather offended because it misleads readers to think that this is how quality literature looks like. It doesnt. Unnatural dialogues of flat characters stating the obvious. Yes, its unfair, Im too critical because it got the Man Booker Prize. But if one is a mediocre writer, adding the WWII and sex and making a house a central character does not improve your writing style, really, sorry.Or perhaps I just don t get it because,
Europe between the wars is heady in its mix of optimism and foreboding, and both impel the readers involvement in this story of the unlikely meeting between a Czech Jewish capitalist and his wife in Venice to a brash and forward-looking minimalist Austrian architect. The result is the Landauer House of the story with its famed der Glasraum. The author adds a note that raum in German means much more than room: it also encompasses space, volume, and zone in its expansive meanings. And this is
It took me a while to warm up to The Glass Room but when I finished it I had goose bumps all over. I was overwhelmed.The Glass Room by Siman Mawer is about a glass room in a house and the people who inhabit it over the years. It is about the Landauer family and the architect they hire to build the house, Ranier von Apt, who is loosely based on Mies van der Rohe. This house is to be different from any other one built from the inside out and with a living space that changes functions as the
The home commissioned by automobile maker Victor Landauer and his wife Liesel in 1929 has as a focal point The Glass Room. It is a house built by Modernist architect Rainer Von Abt, who follows Victor's insistence that the house reflect something new rather than continue the tradition of the old, ornamental style that was prevalent among the European wealthy of the time. It sits above a town on a hill in Czechoslovakia, with spectacular views, and it offered "the most remarkable experience of
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