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Glass Room Simon Mawer 9781408700778 Books

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Glass Room Simon Mawer 9781408700778 Books

Simon Mawer's "The Glass Room" (2009) is a lengthy historical novel set largely in Czechoslovakia. The novel begins in the years prior to WW II and proceeds through the war years. It then covers the Soviet occupation and, briefly, the Velvet Revolution.

This large historical sweep does not cover the full scope of the novel. Mawer tells the story of a wealthy family, the Landauers, beginning with the arranged marriage of Viktor, a wealthy automobile manufacturer and a secular Jew, to Liesel, the daughter of Landauer's business partner. At the beginning of their marriage, the Landauers contract with a brilliant young architect, Rainer von Abt, to build a large modernistic home on an elevation in a city called Mesto. The house is spare and lean and features the extensive use of glass, open spaces, lack of ornament, and an expensive onyx inner wall. The Laundauers are to be free to live their lives as they see fit, without constraints of the past. At the outset of the book, Mawer explains that the architect, von Abt, the house, and the city are based on actual people and places. But the reader does not require background in the histories to understand the story. The major characters in the book, other than von Abt, are fictitious.

The book opens at the end of the story, giving the reader an overview of what has happened. An aged Liesel returns to the Landauer House after an absence of 30 years to reflect on her eventful life and on her family. Following the introductory chapter, the story is told chronologically through many chapters. The chapters are each short which helps with the readibility of the book and the narrative flow.

Historical events, such as the appeasement of Hitler over Czechslovakia and the subsequent War and Holocaust are juxtaposed against the story of the Landauers and their modernist home. The family is educated and its life is filled with music as exemplified by the Bosendorfer grand piano in the onyx room. The piano music of Czech composer Leos JanackekJanácek: Piano Works (Complete) (which I have recently had occasion to hear) and Ravel's imaginative piano movement "Odine", which tells the mythical story of a water-sprite, play large roles in the book. The Landauers have two children, a girl Ottilie, and a boy, Martin, the latter the product of a difficult birth. The marriage between Viktor and Leisel begins to suffer from a lack of passion. On his business trips, Viktor gradually becomes attached to a part-time prostitute, Kata. Liesel becomes sexually attracted to her best friend Hana, who is also married to a Jewish man and who engages in a wide range of infidelities. Because Viktor is Jewish, the family is forced to flee near midway in the novel and the Nazis steal their home. At that point, the scenes of the book shift between the Landauers and their exile and their friends and modernistic home and their fates.

Much of this book as wonderfully written and developed as Mawer builds tension and successfully integrates the story of the lives of his characters with large historical events. As the book proceeds, it comes dangerously close to collapse. The portrayal of life under the pressures of WW II seems to lose its focus. Too much of the story turns upon coincidence. As the work develops, the sexual infidelities, repressions, and experimentations of most of the characters come increasingly to the forefront. Sexuality is important in understanding character and events. In this book, sexuality becomes imposed in from the outside, so to speak. It gradually becomes unconvincing. The characters' sexual activities and orientations seem to be discussed more for their own sake than as part of an integral portrayal of their lives. In addition, as the book moves along in time its focus starts to wander. The chapters become shorter and the characters less fully described. Late in the book, during the time of Soviet occupation, Mawer introduces a largely new set of characters and stories only lightly tied to the Landauers and their modernistic home. The cohesion of the book is tested.

The book tells a poignant story of the War and a lost earlier world. Although it does not bear the symbolic weight that Mawer puts on it, the Landauer house suggest that the modernist project of understanding and living in the present itself becomes a moment in history. The large themes in the book are not fully realized or tied together. "The Glass Room" still is a novel of history, ideas, and character that for the most part worked for me and held my attention.

Robin Friedman


Tags : Glass Room [Simon Mawer] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Cool. Balanced. Modern. The precisions of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession and the fear of failure - these are things that happen in the Glass Room.<BR><BR>High on a Czechoslovak hill,Simon Mawer,Glass Room,Little Brown and Company,1408700778,Fiction - General,Literary,Modern fiction

Glass Room Simon Mawer 9781408700778 Books Reviews

The globally renowned architect Philip Johnson built a home for himself in 1949 in New Canaan, Connecticut, that became known as the Glass House. The home is recognized as a masterpiece, perhaps the architect’s finest work. Simon Mawer’s superbly suspenseful novel, The Glass Room, revolves around a similar house built by an Austrian architect in a Czechoslovakian town twenty years earlier. (However, the author claims that his inspiration was a villa designed by Mies van der Rohe and built round the same time in Czechoslovakia.) The title refers to the glass-walled combined living and dining room that was the home’s most visible element. In the novel’s conceit, the building becomes known as the Landauer House, after the family for which it was built. Their story, and the action that takes place in the house, are the central preoccupations of the novel, told over the span of more than sixty years.

Czechoslovakia from 1928 to 1990

Viktor Landauer is the wealthy and highly regarded owner and chief executive of Czechoslovakia’s principal automobile manufacturing company. Culturally Jewish but not observant, his wife, Liesl, is a beautiful and artistically sensitive young woman who is gentile. Shortly after moving into their new home in 1929, she gives birth in quick succession to two children, a girl named Ottilie and a boy named Martin. The cast of principal characters also includes Liesl’s best friend, Hana Hanakova; Viktor’s sometime mistress, Katalin Kalman, and her daughter Marika; the house’s caretaker, Josef Lanik; and Captain Stahl, the Nazi “scientist” who commandeers the house after the family has fled to Switzerland. Others crop up later in the story in significant but short-lived roles. Mawer paints each of these characters with a fine brush and a sophisticated understanding of human motivation. Each is unique and difficult to forget.

These characters and, in some cases, their children and grandchildren, interact in succession over a span of six decades. During that time Czechoslovakia morphs from an artificial national entity carved out of Central Europe by the victorious Allies in World War I, to a Nazi colony, to Soviet occupation and oppression, to independence once the Berlin Wall falls, and finally into the rump independent state known today as the Czech Republic.

Life in Nazi Europe

Mawer’s historical novel is centered around the experiences of the Landauer family, their servants, and friends from 1938, when the Nazis seized power in Prague, through the end of World War II in 1945. Events that occur before the Nazi invasion are prologue; what comes after is an epilogue. The same might be said about the history of Europe in general during that time period.

Several of the characters in Mawer’s novel are Jewish Viktor Landauer, Hana Hanakova’s husband, Katalin and Marika Kalman. Their disparate experiences dramatize the length to which Hitler’s minions went to rid Europe of a people who had inhabited the continent for two thousand years.

About the author

Simon Mawer worked as a biology teacher for most of his life. British, he now lives in Italy. He published his first novel in 1989 and has written ten others since then.
Another fascinating book by Simon Mawer. He must have gone through the process of building an architecturally significant house. The house is itself a character in the book, the almost living breathing backdrop to the lives and misadventures of the family who build the house and have to interact with the Germans occupying Czechoslovakia and the people they meet and fall in love with. As usual with Mawer, there are sexual adventures, and difficult alliances. He sheds considerable light on life in occupied Czechoslovakia, including a good look at ReichsProtector Heydrich. There is also good material on life post WW II in Soviet Czechoslovakia. The escape of the family from occupied Europe by train was handled very well indeed.

The book was fascinating, but not quite with the dramatic tension of the Marian Sutro books.
Simon Mawer's "The Glass Room" (2009) is a lengthy historical novel set largely in Czechoslovakia. The novel begins in the years prior to WW II and proceeds through the war years. It then covers the Soviet occupation and, briefly, the Velvet Revolution.

This large historical sweep does not cover the full scope of the novel. Mawer tells the story of a wealthy family, the Landauers, beginning with the arranged marriage of Viktor, a wealthy automobile manufacturer and a secular Jew, to Liesel, the daughter of Landauer's business partner. At the beginning of their marriage, the Landauers contract with a brilliant young architect, Rainer von Abt, to build a large modernistic home on an elevation in a city called Mesto. The house is spare and lean and features the extensive use of glass, open spaces, lack of ornament, and an expensive onyx inner wall. The Laundauers are to be free to live their lives as they see fit, without constraints of the past. At the outset of the book, Mawer explains that the architect, von Abt, the house, and the city are based on actual people and places. But the reader does not require background in the histories to understand the story. The major characters in the book, other than von Abt, are fictitious.

The book opens at the end of the story, giving the reader an overview of what has happened. An aged Liesel returns to the Landauer House after an absence of 30 years to reflect on her eventful life and on her family. Following the introductory chapter, the story is told chronologically through many chapters. The chapters are each short which helps with the readibility of the book and the narrative flow.

Historical events, such as the appeasement of Hitler over Czechslovakia and the subsequent War and Holocaust are juxtaposed against the story of the Landauers and their modernist home. The family is educated and its life is filled with music as exemplified by the Bosendorfer grand piano in the onyx room. The piano music of Czech composer Leos JanackekJanácek Piano Works (Complete) (which I have recently had occasion to hear) and Ravel's imaginative piano movement "Odine", which tells the mythical story of a water-sprite, play large roles in the book. The Landauers have two children, a girl Ottilie, and a boy, Martin, the latter the product of a difficult birth. The marriage between Viktor and Leisel begins to suffer from a lack of passion. On his business trips, Viktor gradually becomes attached to a part-time prostitute, Kata. Liesel becomes sexually attracted to her best friend Hana, who is also married to a Jewish man and who engages in a wide range of infidelities. Because Viktor is Jewish, the family is forced to flee near midway in the novel and the Nazis steal their home. At that point, the scenes of the book shift between the Landauers and their exile and their friends and modernistic home and their fates.

Much of this book as wonderfully written and developed as Mawer builds tension and successfully integrates the story of the lives of his characters with large historical events. As the book proceeds, it comes dangerously close to collapse. The portrayal of life under the pressures of WW II seems to lose its focus. Too much of the story turns upon coincidence. As the work develops, the sexual infidelities, repressions, and experimentations of most of the characters come increasingly to the forefront. Sexuality is important in understanding character and events. In this book, sexuality becomes imposed in from the outside, so to speak. It gradually becomes unconvincing. The characters' sexual activities and orientations seem to be discussed more for their own sake than as part of an integral portrayal of their lives. In addition, as the book moves along in time its focus starts to wander. The chapters become shorter and the characters less fully described. Late in the book, during the time of Soviet occupation, Mawer introduces a largely new set of characters and stories only lightly tied to the Landauers and their modernistic home. The cohesion of the book is tested.

The book tells a poignant story of the War and a lost earlier world. Although it does not bear the symbolic weight that Mawer puts on it, the Landauer house suggest that the modernist project of understanding and living in the present itself becomes a moment in history. The large themes in the book are not fully realized or tied together. "The Glass Room" still is a novel of history, ideas, and character that for the most part worked for me and held my attention.

Robin Friedman