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341 of 343 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A near-perfect novel of architecture, art and love, August 16, 2009
This review is from: The Glass Room. Simon Mawer (Hardcover)
The Glass Room is a novel about a house, a real and remarkable one, although the story and characters are fictional. It begins with the return of Liesel Landauer, now elderly and blind, to the house that she, a gentile, shared with her husband Viktor, a prosperous Jewish manufacturer of fine automobiles. The Landauer House, which sits on a hill overlooking the Czechoslovakian city of M'sto, was designed for the young couple by a famous Viennese architect in the 1920s, and was a classic work of modern design. The centerpiece of the house is the Glass Room, which has large plate glass windows and is partitioned by a wall made of onyx that changes in appearance with the position of the sun. Mawer describes the Glass Room early in the book, as the Landauers see it for the first time:
"It had become a palace of light, light bouncing off the chrome pillars, light refulgent on the walls, light glistening on the dew in the garden, light reverberating from the glass. It as though they stood inside a crystal of salt."
The Glass Room becomes a place where anything and everything is possible, as previous structural and cultural restraints are lifted. The wealthy and sophisticated couple embrace their new home to the fullest, using it frequently to host friends and business colleagues. Liesel's best friend, Hana, a irreverent, beautiful and sexually hungry married woman, is a frequent visitor who provides vitality and spark to the setting.
However, changes are occurring in Europe that darken and threaten the couple's idyllic existence. Hitler's national socialism spreads through and beyond nearby Germany, and the livelihood of Jews in Czechoslovakia becomes slowly but progressively more difficult. The Landauers initially ignore the warnings, as their wealth and influence insulate them from the growing menace. The couple agrees to take in a young woman who has been forced to flee from Vienna, a woman who is well known to Viktor. Finally the couple decides to flee their beloved house and country, but by the time they decide to do so, the Germans have already occupied Czechoslovakia. Hana and her Jewish husband, however, decide to stay in M'sto.
The novel then alternates between the lives of the Landauers and the new occupants, leading up to Liesel's eventual return to the Landauer House.
This was a brilliant and near-perfect novel that covers Europe before and during World War II and the subsequent decline in European culture, and includes rich descriptions of architecture, art and music. Love, infidelity and devotion are infused throughout the book, but ultimately the main story and character is the Landauer House with its Glass Room, and the effects it has on its inhabitants and visitors.
I suppose the highest praise I could give this novel is that I would like to start reading it again from the beginning. It is easily the best of the 2009 Booker Prize longlisted books I've read so far, and would be a deserving winner of the award, in my opinion.
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129 of 131 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Glass walls let in both light and darkness, October 12, 2009
This review is from: The Glass Room. Simon Mawer (Hardcover)
The author tells us in a Note at the beginning of this novel that the beautiful modern house that contains the Glass Room is not fictional. Here called the Landauer House in Mesto, it is in fact the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, completed in 1930; and, excellent and faithful though the descriptions of it are, some readers may like to look at Google Images to see what the exterior and the interior actually looked like. They can also ascertain that the real name of the architect, here called Rainer von Abt, was Mies van der Rohe, and the real owners of the house were Fritz Tugendhat (a textile magnate) and his wife Greta, who were BOTH Jewish: in the novel only the husband (Viktor) is Jewish, his wife (Liesel) is not. Well, we have been told in the Note that most of the characters in the novel are fictional, but that some of them are not. So, for instance, one member of Victor's circle is the armaments manufacturer Fritz Mandel who really existed (a converted Viennese Jew who nevertheless had close contacts with the Italian fascists and German Nazis), and Mandl was really married for a time to Eva Kiesler, better known as the sensational film star Hedy Lamarr, who in this novel is said to have had a brief lesbian relationship with Liesl closest friend, Hana Hanacova. When the Nazis confiscated the Villa Tugendhat, they rented it out to the aircraft manufacturer Walter Messerschmidt. This does happen in the book, but before that, the novel has the villa used as a Eugenics Research Centre, and the people working there are students of Nazi eugenics departments that really existed. Fritz Tugendhat, like Viktor Landauer, did die in 1958; and old Mrs Tugendhat did accept an invitation in 1967 (though in the novel Mawer has Liesel accept the invitation after Dubcek had become General Secretary in January 1968 and makes the actual visit take place after Dubcek's fall, which was in August 1968). I am unfortunately always troubled by such 'poetic licence', by wondering what is fact and what is fiction - not that that detracts in any way from the considerable quality of the novel.
The cultural and political situations described in the book are real enough: the clash between tradition and modernity, the growing tension between Germans and Czechs in Czechoslovakia, the rising menace of Nazi Germany, the refugees pouring into Czechoslovakia after the Anschluss; then the German occupation; then the Russians arrive (a vivid chapter), and they did in fact stable their horses in the Villa Tugendhat. The novel then slightly conflates what happened to the Villa under communist rule: it first became a dance studio and then a rehabilitation centre for crippled children. Finally it becomes a piece of architectural heritage.
Whether fictional or not, the characters and the relationships between them are well drawn. There is especially the uninhibited Hana, Liesel's best friend. Liesel, for all her modern cultural tastes, is much more conventional, though she manages to accommodate herself somehow to live in a menage a trois. When the Nazis take over Czechoslovakia in 1938, the Landauers (like the Tugendhats) emigrate (but to Switzerland and the United States, whereas the Tugendhats went to Venezuela), with a particularly heart-wrenching episode in the process. In the later sections of the book some situations of the earlier part repeat themselves, like variations on a theme: music, like architecture, plays a considerable part in the novel. And the very end is deeply moving.
The Glass Room, at the centre of the novel has seen so much: political changes have washed through it; much suffering; complicated human relationships; many erotic episodes; confessions. It is redolent with symbolism, some of it elusive. It stands for clarity, light, purity, reason, and harmony, and as such has a hard time surviving in an age of unreason, corruption, darkness and disharmony. But survive it does.
As in his earlier 'The Gospel of Judas' (see my review), Mawer loves using foreign words where English words would do ('Hakenkreuz' for 'swastika', for example - and I did come across two small mistakes in his German). True, sometimes there is no good English equivalent: he rightly says in a postscript that the word 'Raum' has resonances which the word 'room' does not. But this novel is much better and much freer of cliches than that earlier one, and richly deserved to be a contender for the Man-Booker Prize.
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35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Wow. This book packs a punch., November 21, 2009
This book has some emotional heft. It is centered around "Landauer House", which is based on Villa Tugendhat in what is now the Czech Republic; however, the real story is about what happened to people in that area during the Nazi rise to power and World War II.
In the book, the ultra- modern house was built to symbolize a new beginning for the fledgling country of Czechoslovakia and its inhabitants. However, the beginning was to very quickly come to an end for the Landauer family and those around them. The book follows the Landauers as the house is built, while they live in the home, and after they must flee Czechoslovakia when the Germans invade.
The characters are very nuanced and complex, while the house itself is built be transparent and stark. One of the wonderful juxtapositions of the books is when, during WWII, a Nazi scientist uses the home as a laboratory to try and classify people by their race (ie Jew vs. Aryan) using physical characteristics. He finds the task impossible to accomplish. This seemed to me to be an over-arching theme of the book, given that the Landauers themselves were from many different backgrounds, spoke several languages, and didn't appear to be allied with any philosophy other than progress.
To me this book was all about gray areas and the inability to classify people into neat categories, as well as the danger in attempting to do so. Somehow, with everything else going on in the book, the author also managed to provide a tapestry of sexuality that deeply humanizes the characters.
I found this book to be extremely moving, and far from a usual treatment of the WWII era in Europe.
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