The Mercy Room: A Novel [Hardcover]

Gilles Rozier (Author), Anthea Bell (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 21, 2006

A brilliant exploration of sexual obsession and human frailty in a country gripped by war. In a small town in occupied France during World War II, a teacher of German is recruited by the Gestapo to translate sensitive documents. Every week, waiting for the next assignment, our narrator sits outside the commandant's office and watches prisoners being led to detention cells before being deported. Always existing on the fringes of life, caring only for books, the teacher has never done anything heroic. And certainly this is no time to get entangled in other people's problems. But one day a stunning Jewish soldier is among the prisoners. His name is Herman and the teacher recognizes him from their lives before the war. In an unprecedented act of boldness, the teacher sneaks Herman out of headquarters, brings him home, and hides him in the cellar, along with a cache of banned books. So begins an extraordinary and shattering affair in which two people and two antagonistic languages, Yiddish and German, are magnetically attracted. In a tour de force of novelistic technique, Gilles Rozier never reveals the gender of his narrator--opening the question of how many levels of transgression and risk the teacher is taking by hiding Herman. THE MERCY ROOM is an exquisite novel about the power of desire and the competing forces of good or ill in the heart of each of us.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Gilles Rozier's breathtaking third novel The Mercy Room is ample demonstration that a main character doesn't need to be lovable, but only closely observed and adroitly, somewhat ruthlessly portrayed. Set in a small town in occupied France during World War II, The Mercy Room is so precisely placed inside the consciousness of its first-person narrator, an emotionally buttoned-down teacher of German, that it feel claustrophobic, like the "mercy room" in which much of its action occurs. The teacher, whose sex we never learn, has only two passions: for German literature (especially by authors forbidden by the Nazis--Thomas Mann, Heinrich Heine) and for the young French soldier who, before the occupation, had delivered documents to be translated by the narrator for the local military leaders. Now the narrator translates for the German commandant instead. In a dark corridor of the Gestapo offices, waiting for the latest assignment, he or she catches sight of the young French soldier, "brought there by fate," in a cluster of Jews being processed for deportation. It is surprisingly easy to lead him away from the group and out of the building while the German guards are busy.

And so the narrator, who conceals the beloved in a hidden, dirt-floored reading room in his or her cellar, begins a great love affair--a contrast in almost every way from the narrator's bloodless, unconsummated marriage. An act so personal as saving one's secret beloved and keeping him alive for two years in a cellar room may not be exactly heroic, as the narrator admits. Soon after his arrival, the narrator brought down to the captive two shirts from his or her dead father's wardrobe, and two sets of underwear--one belonging to the narrator and another to the narrator's spouse, Jude.

I liked to think of him clad alternatingly in men¹s and women's undergarments beneath his trousers; it was a mild way of humiliating him. Blame it on the war but I wanted to maintain a certain ascendancy over him, make his life easier but not too easy, in the same way as you might keep a canary in a cage and pretend you¹ve forgotten to change its water just so that it can't bathe properly. I could have done much worse, for he was at my mercy.

But power, in a love affair, is no simple matter. The narrator still burns for the young soldier. "The dim light down there hid him from me and increased my desire, just as the darkness makes an amusement park ghost train exciting. But what about him? Was he grateful to me for saving him; would that be enough to win him over?"

While the narrator's uncertain gender deliciously complicates the relationship between the soldier and his rescuer/captor, the shell game of pronouns and descriptions required to maintain this gender-ambiguous status may annoy some readers. But it also has the effect of implicating the reader in the murky ethics of the situation, since it is the reader's decision, at any moment, which direction the gender should go. It's a gimmick, yes, like the backward narrative of Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, but one which heightens the pathos of an almost unbearably affecting story. --Regina Marler

From Publishers Weekly

Thought provoking but ultimately disappointing, this novel by the director of the Center for Yiddish Culture in Paris attempts to probe the psyche of a Vichy collaborator who falls in love with a Jew and hides him in the family cellar. In a small French hometown, the narrator, who remains nameless—and whose gender also remains unspecified throughout, though some hints are dropped—teaches German at the local girls' grammar school and also translates documents for the Gestapo. Cold and unfeeling, the narrator can only summon up passion for German language and literature, particularly for forbidden works by Jewish authors like Mann and Heine. As the war rages on, the narrator drives his or her neglected spouse to commit suicide; obsesses about a sister's boisterous sex life with her Nazi boyfriend; and sneaks a Jew, Herman, out of Gestapo headquarters and into the narrator's cellar, where the two become lovers. When they aren't having sex, they're discussing literature: Herman learns German and the narrator becomes expert in Yiddish. In probing the thin line between heroism and collaboration, Rozier draws coy parallels between the otherness of homosexuals and that of Jews in Nazi Germany. While that may seem daring, or titillating, in Europe, it's unlikely to win fans here. (Mar. 21)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 156 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; Tra edition (March 21, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316159735
• ISBN-13: 978-0316159739
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,293,548 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intrigue and drama!, March 29, 2006

By 

Armchair Interviews (Minneapolis, MN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Mercy Room: A Novel (Hardcover)

The unnamed teacher/narrator of German lives in a town in occupied France during World War II. The teacher (whose gender is unknown) cares only for literature, and marries, perhaps because it is expected. It is certainly not to partake in a sexual relationship as the marriage isn't consummated in eight years.

The teacher is recruited by the Nazis to translate documents for them. Each time the teacher goes to the commandant's office to wait for the assignment, the teacher watches as prisoners are led to detention cells before deportation. The teacher recognized some of the prisoners as former neighbors.

The teacher exists primarily through literature. Other than personal difficulties, the war doesn't seem to impact the teacher. Certainly it hasn't required involvement, heroic or otherwise.

Then one day the teacher recognizes a Jewish soldier among the prisoners and sneaks the soldier (Herman) out of the headquarters. The teacher brings Herman home and hides him in the cellar of the teacher's family home where a torrid affair takes place under the "noses" of the family and an SS man who was having an affair with the teacher's sister.

The Mercy Room is stunning, yet disturbing on many levels. The story is unique and interesting but is filled with such a feeling of hopelessness and sadness. The lovers are doomed from the beginning and the family is shattered by the war and by a family member's collaboration with the Nazis. And the fact that the reader doesn't know the gender of the narrator conjures up different scenarios that change, depending upon the sex assigned by the reader to the narrator at that moment.

The Mercy Room is a relatively short but powerful novel and its length serves it well. A longer story might unravel, as it would be difficult to keep the narrator's gender a secret indefinitely.

Armchair Interviews says: If you enjoy intrigue, drama and a well-written story, The Mercy Room would be an enjoyable read.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Quality Of Mercy, Strained, November 8, 2006

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mercy Room: A Novel (Hardcover)

Gilles Rozier (and his extraordinarily fine translator Anthea Bell) presents one of the more strangely involving stories of the French Occupation and Resistance during World War II. This brief (147 pages) novel is not only exquisitely written, it is terse, rich in mysteries and techniques, and raises more questions than it answers. Some may dismiss Rozier's novel as a gimmick: the narrator is never identified with a name or a gender and that identification is left completely up to the reader. Are we reading a story about an icy female German teacher who seduces/befriends a Jewish soldier into her protective cellar hideaway, or are we following a closeted gay man whose frustrations with life in the clime of the country during war encourage him to seduce/befriend a sensuous potential lover into the sanctity of his cellar with the hopes of eventually savoring the sexual relationship which has been denied him? The choice is the reader's option. For this reader the second alternative makes the story far more powerful on many levels and thus the male/male relationship is the road of interpretation elected.

In a small French town during the Occupation lives a family: the father has been extricated by the Nazis, the mother tends to the home, the sister Anne lusts upstairs taking a SS officer Volker as her constant daily lover, the sister Isabelle remains out of the picture, and the other 'child' is our narrator. He (my choice) is a brilliant scholar whose chief loves in life are books, German literature and language (especially the works of Nazi forbidden Thomas Mann and Heinrich Heine). As a teacher in the local school his aptitudes are recognized and he is selected to translate sensitive documents for the Nazis. He has had one 'friend', one Hans Joachim, a handsome German who disappears when the Resistance and the Occupation clash. He agrees to marry one Jude, consenting to fulfill a family duty but completely denying any physical or emotional contact with her. His 'work' is delivered for translation by a stunningly handsome German officer Herman who hums Chopin while our narrator works, creating a strong sense of sexual tension and desire.

When our narrator is moved to the halls of the Nazis to await pickup and delivery of the desired documents he watches the towns Jews march past him, surely on their way to railroad cars, camps, and extermination. When Herman appears in the line with these condemned Jews our narrator arranges to have him escape to the home of the narrator where he is sequestered in the cellar in a library full of books. Herman speaks and reads Yiddish, loves Heine as much as our narrator, and after our narrator's successfully engineered capture of Herman's private Heine book from his previous apartment, Herman at last shows the sensual, physical attraction to our narrator and they begin a blissful affair, with sexual encounters partially supplanting their mutual love for Heine. Herman teaches our narrator Yiddish in exchange for what becomes an over two-year concealment as a Jew in hiding from the Nazis - accepting food, shelter and reading forbidden books and performing forbidden sexual acts in exchange.

As the war pulses on, Jude commits suicide out of longing for a normal marriage bed, our narrator eventually murders the SS Volker (whose sexual couplings with Anne disgust the family who happens to be protected by the officer's daily visits), dispenses with his body in the same cellar, a fact that creates a schism between the two lovers. When the Liberation finally arrives our narrator helps Herman to escape in the SS uniform disrobed from Volker, but the long awaited escape is thwarted by Herman's being killed by the Resistance. And our narrator ages, remembering the aspects of the French Occupation that reveal just how delicate was the quality of mercy in the time of war.

Rozier's writing is pungent, passionate when the mood calls for it, and coolly isolated when the events of the life in France during the war are described. It is a genuinely involving story and whether the reader elects to see the narrator as male or female makes no difference in the power of the events that occur. This is one of those books that, once opened, glues the reader to the pages in a one evening's read. It is startlingly effective. Grady Harp, November 06

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thunder, November 6, 2006

By 

Lee Armstrong (Winterville, NC United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mercy Room: A Novel (Hardcover)

Perhaps the cover attracted me with a man and woman hugging like front & back covers of a book, connected by the binding giving us the title "The Mercy Room." The book tells us that this is Gilles Rozier's third book, yet it fails to list his previous two books. Perhaps they have yet to be translated. Anthea Bell's translation reads well in English. I found it fascinating that the original Yiddish or German poetry was often found in the text, causing me to flip to the back of the book and read the English translation in context.

This is an unusual story. It is most unusual because of the emotional temperament of the narrator and main character. Rozier plays a little head game with the readers by leaving the gender of the narrator open-ended. We know the main character marries Jude; but Jude's gender is never tipped by use of male or female pronouns. I spent a few pages uncertain of the gender, but then quickly decided that the narrator is female and Jude was her husband. My thinking is that a guy might well kill himself for lack of sexual contact, whereas a woman might be more ambivalent. I also looked at the jacket photograph as being male on the left and female on the right; so I figured my interpretation was consistent with the publisher.

However, our narrator is an ice queen. Her passions run to the German language and literature. There is not much else that turns her on. She is a dedicated Frenchwoman, being revolted by the Nazi SS Volker who has sex with her sister. The other family characters are almost all nondescript. The mother is mostly silent and self-contained. The sister Anne is mostly viewed by the narrator as she looks up at the shaking chandelier as Volker frolics. The other sister Isabelle and their kids are almost entirely removed from the story; we never encounter them as personalities, only as family presences. So what comes across is severe isolation.

The little "Mercy Room" in the cellar where the narrator hides banned literature and reads secretly speaks of isolation. The narrator's connection to her job even speaks of her isolation from her students, not getting involved with them on a human level, just teaching so that she can buy more books and read. Her marriage to Jude is never consummated. She speaks almost with naivete since her detachment is so complete. In eight years of marriage, she doesn't see her husband without his clothes on, and prefers it that way.

What is good about this novel is its stealth language. It sneaks up on you. We get lulled by the beautiful description and poetry and then walloped by some major piece of action that comes without buildup or analysis. The killing of Volker happens. Herman's rescue occurs quickly as does his demise. The only bit of personal life on which Rozier dwells is the lovemaking. This thunders. We feel the exquisite discovery. Yet, this is done in isolation as well, in the Mercy Room where sounds cannot let on about Herman's presence and where Herman gives few details of his life before rescue or what will occur after liberation.

Rozier's book is quiet & literary. Its brevity aids the story, just long enough to hold our attention and say goodbye at the right moment. It is a study in isolation, both emotional & physical. It has a somber beauty and is worth the quick reading time. Enjoy!