Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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55 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A dramatic human story to match the elegance of the glass room, 26 Feb 2009
The Glass Room refers to the dramatic living area of a modernist house built on a hill-side in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Its architect was commissioned by Victor Landauer and his wife Liesel, with a brief to design a house made of glass and steel, devoid of ornamentation or unnecessary decoration, a house fit for a stylish couple, owners of the Landauer company, makers of luxury motor-cars.
The house is built and lives up to expectations, the young couple receiving guests in the glass room, with its onyx walls and its breathtaking views. Victor and Leisel are wealthy and thoroughly modern couple and their new house matches their style perfectly, "living inside a work of art is an experience of sublime delight - the tranquillity of the large living room and the intimacy of the smaller rooms . . . the most remarkable experience of modern living".
Simon Mawer follows the history of the house over the next 50 years, but of course the Landauer family and their friends are the main point of the story. Is it possible to tell the story of a family without also recalling the places in which they live? We build our homes as an expression of ourselves and our memories are often centred on the sense of place as much as on those who inhabit those spaces. Leisel Landauer has her great friend and confidante, the stylish and erratic Hanna. Her husband has another friend who come to play a large part in both their lives. Children are born and grow and find that the house has a place in their lives too, although perhaps retrospectively.
Beginning in the 1930s in Czechoslovakia, Mawer's story is of course about the war and its aftermath. Victor Landauer is Jewish, and after the Germans take over the Sudetenland, the family flee to Switzerland, leaving Hanna and other friends to watch the house fall into German hands to be used as a laboratory. The story follows Hanna and her attempts to survive under a hostile regime. Meanwhile in Switzerland the Landauers plot their escape out of Europe across the Atlantic and we read of their only partially successful attempts to keep their household together.
Mawer does not leave us wondering about the fate of his characters. We follow the progress of the house under Soviet rule and later under the new Czcechoslovak state, and in these "flash-forwards" we get glimpses of the lives lived by the Landauers and their friends.
These are the bones of the story, but it is impossible to say more without ruining it for other readers. What is special about the book is Mawer's great gifts for character development and his depictions of the terrible human conflicts brought on a family in such unstable times. This is a book about the divisions inflicted on Europe in the 1930s and their tragic consequences. All the characters are marked by their times and some barely recover. And yet there are passages of lyrical brightness and cathartic resolutions of thirty year old losses which made this reader at least sigh with thankfulness.
I recently read Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, the story of another industrial dynastic family, and was struck by the similarities between the two books. Really, Simon Mawer has achieved something not much less that Mann's classic masterpiece and I can only congratulate him on his achievement. I am particularly impressed by his research, including a significant amount of linguistic background around the Czech language and its relationship to German. I do hope that The Glass Room is a serious consideration this year's Booker Prize - it is certainly well within that league.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A House of Character, 7 Mar 2009
In his eighth novel, The Glass Room, Mawer sets himself the challenge of bringing a house to life, making it the central character in a novel, a feat of fictive architecture that risks relegation to the ranks of literary kitsch, yet one that the writer pulls off magisterially.
A rich young couple in 1930s Czechoslovakia commission for themselves a house that will come to define modernism, a design of spare lines, eschewing ornament, in minimalist style. It has one astounding feature: the Glass Room, a living area that looks out through walls of sheer glass over the surrounding town of Mesto. Inside the Glass Room, a sculpture of a woman's torso, the only ornament allowed by the architect, stands beside a partition made from a single slab of onyx. Chrome-plated columns hold up the structure, reflecting the Room and the town, mirroring and witnessing a series of events that span several crucial European decades. The Glass Room provides for the young couple a captive volume of light and space, an augury of brightness and optimism, a physical metaphor for integrity, transparency, and hope.
History shatters the idyll. War breaks out. The family are forced to escape, the husband being Jewish. The house, abandoned by its creators, mutely offers shelter to a succession of Nazis, Soviets, and Communist Czechs who come to use it for their own purposes. Finally, with the lifting of the Iron Curtain, and the return of the wife, now aged and blind, the future may finally lay the past to rest.
Two characters linger in the reader's memory: Liesel, the young wife, herself the inspiration for the house, and Hana, Liesel's confidante and devoted friend. Liesel, like the house, is passive, lovely, sparely drawn, present in her absence, and buffetted by events that she never herself initiates. She is as sheer and transparent as the Glass Room itself. Hana, on the other hand, is vivacious, omnisexual, passionate, and full of wit and insight. She is flesh to Liesel's skeleton; Hana is the soul of the Glass Room where Liesel was its muse. Their friendship and their understated love drive much of the emotional tension in the plot, stretched taut as the tightrope across which we must journey from their reunion in the prologue to the novel's resolution.
The Glass Room grips you with the power of invention, with the wordplay that spans four languages, with the accuracy of re-creation of a Europe in turmoil, with the construction of an ethereal space forged out of words and light, and with the reluctant tears evoked by the last, unexpected, redemptive reunion that lies waiting in ambush even if foreshadowed from the start.
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22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
People who live in glass rooms shouldn't ...., 2 Feb 2009
This is a another first rate novel by Simon Mawer. The central protaganists are the Czech/Jewish industrialist Landauers, who are traced from their courtship and marriage to their exile from the Nazis through Switzerland to the United States. But the real hero of the book is the Glass Room (Raum - not exactly the same thing in German or for that matter in Czech or in Russian as is noted in the novel) itself, a fictional version of Mies Van der Rohe's Tugendhat (the architect makes his own appearance as Rainier Von Abt), which the urbane Viktor builds as a marital home for his almost adventurous wife, Liesel. The house - though house is not quite the right word either - metamorphosizes several times over the century, from rich man's showpiece, to nazi biometric research centre to postwar physiotherapy dance studio to communist museum to symbol of the Prague Spring. The house - given some imaginative substance by a series of prints spaced throughout - is far more than a building: it acts as a mirror for the great themes of the twentieth century . It is also the venue for a lot of forbidden sex, its transparency perhaps suggesting a riskseeking desire to be discovered. The waves of history and of eroticsm flood together in this glass room, the one, perhaps, making the other bearable.
The plot depends a fair bit on coincidence - the appearance of Kata, Viktor's part-time mistress from Vienna, as a refugee in Mesto and her subsequent transition to becoming his children's nanny, for example. However, the pace of the story, the excellence of the prose and the ever present mixture of evil, hope and eroticism, and the great lighthouse beam reflection of the glass room itself more than compensate.
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