The Glass Room
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. High on a Czechoslovak hill, the Landauer House shines as a wonder of steel and glass and onyx built specially for newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer, a Jew married to a gentile. But the radiant honesty of 1930 that the house, with its unique Glass Room, seems to engender quickly tarnishes as the storm clouds of WW2 gather, and eventually the family must flee, accompanied by Viktor's lover and her child. But the house's story is far from over, and as it passes from hand to hand, from Czech to Russian, both the best and the worst of the history of Eastern Europe becomes somehow embodied and perhaps emboldened within the beautiful and austere surfaces and planes so carefully designed, until events become full-circle.
4.6 out of 5 based on 7 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
416 |
| RRP |
£16.99 |
| Date of Publication |
January 2009 |
| ISBN |
978-1408700778 |
| Publisher |
Little, Brown |
| |
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. High on a Czechoslovak hill, the Landauer House shines as a wonder of steel and glass and onyx built specially for newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer, a Jew married to a gentile. But the radiant honesty of 1930 that the house, with its unique Glass Room, seems to engender quickly tarnishes as the storm clouds of WW2 gather, and eventually the family must flee, accompanied by Viktor's lover and her child. But the house's story is far from over, and as it passes from hand to hand, from Czech to Russian, both the best and the worst of the history of Eastern Europe becomes somehow embodied and perhaps emboldened within the beautiful and austere surfaces and planes so carefully designed, until events become full-circle.
Reviews
The Independent
Lesley Chamberlain
"The book has the feeling of being the author's tribute to the history of a country, and people, to whose First Republic Hitler put paid barely after 20 years of astonishing flourishing. But it's not a history lesson. The text is convincingly studded with a mixture of German and Czech that was the lingua franca of families like the Landauers. The Jewish fates of Viktor, Kata and others are lightly handled, which seems just right in this optimistic, joyful but never facile vision of human achievement. Mawer's perfect pacing clinches a wholly enjoyable and moving read."
13/02/2009
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The Spectator
Anita Brookner
"It should be emphasised that this is not the sort of house that features in most English novels. There are no echoes of Brideshead here. This house — long, low, rectilinear — does not inspire sentimentality. It is its unfamiliar purity which is its outstanding feature, and this purity also characterises the novel itself. There is little sex, little weather, and a total absence of stylistic flourishes. It is, in sum, a humanist novel, unusual in its breadth and scope, and also in its dignity."
25/02/2009
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Standpoint
Caroline Moore
""Architecture", Mies declared, "is the will of the epoch translated into space"; and this is the theme of The Glass Room ... this sounds desperately pretentious. Against all expectations, however, Mawer has created a novel that is subtly and movingly human rather than ponderously symbolic. This is because in Mawer's novel the symbols are shifting, perceived and projected by the changing cast of characters that pass through it."
01/03/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
Jane Shilling
"The Glass Room is a fiction of many remarkable qualities, not the least of which is the way that its sensibility appears utterly unEnglish, as though Mawer were not giving an expert impersonation of a family of haute-bourgeois Czech Jews at the outbreak of the Second World War but had, by some alchemy, become his characters. A benign side effect of this possession is that it enables Mawer to write about sex and desire entirely without the traditional British overtone of rueful bathos, but seriously, steadily, beautifully..."
13/01/2009
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The Sunday Times
Hugo Barnacle
"Mawer's beautifully realised setting does not overwhelm its fictional inhabitants. He avoids excessive character analysis and lets the Landauers and their circle gradually reveal themselves by their actions, often in convincingly unexpected ways... Mawer's observation can be neat and precise... It doesn't always work, though... But still, Mawer's own work of art is a largely sound and satisfying one."
08/02/2009
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The Financial Times
Richard T Kelly
"Whenever a novel sets its main action in one evocative place, guiding us through passing epochs in that same fixed location, the reader may suspect that the novel’s main character is Time itself: the old enemy, ever-present and fundamentally indifferent to our human follies. Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room is one such novel. Not that it lacks drama or passion – indeed it is preoccupied by flesh and sexuality. But it does achieve a rather Parnassian detachment from its characters."
05/01/2009
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The Guardian
Ian Sansom
"The Glass Room is a novel of ideas, yet strongly propelled by plot and characterised by an almost dreamlike simplicity of telling. Comparisons with the work of Michael Frayn would not be misplaced...As it draws towards its inevitable conclusions, the novel becomes perhaps too comfortable a read...More serious a fault are those few occasions when Mawer's narrative omniscience verges on bombast...Such moments stand out because the book otherwise rarely strains to demonstrate its purposes or intelligence. The Glass Room is a rare thing: popular historical fiction with integrity."
24/01/2009
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