The Glass Room: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

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Viktor and Liesel Landauer are wealthy and privileged. He is a Jew who owns a car company and money is no object to them. When the book opens in Czechoslovakia in 1929, life is carefree and easy for them. However, Viktor shortly begins an affair with a woman named Kata and this continues for several years. The times remind me of the 1960’s. Sex is loose and free and people are curious about art, their bodies, and the world at large. Hana, Liesel’s best friend, is a very open and curious woman who appears to have no bounds to her sexuality and curiosity. In every phase of the story, which takes place over six decades, Mawer offers us lovers and love affairs; affirmations of loyalty and betrayals. Although the various relationships and sexual interactions between the characters occupy much of the story space, I found them unconvincing, perhaps because despite their active genitals, the characters are all slightly wooden. Written in eloquent, luminous prose, the novel soars from beginning to end, engulfing the reader into a world that is part-dream, part-imagination, and frightfully real. The latter part of the novel has a few encumbrances--it feels hurried and hamstrung, fitting too many events, people, and perfunctory dramas into a condensed frame. And yet, it doesn't deform this shattering, beautiful story. A bird with a broken wing trills its eternal song. Hope, freedom, history, and love prevail in an upside down house, in a glass room.

I love this series. I'm about to branch off into another of Cleeves' series (the Shetland series) because she's so wonderful. But it may just be that I love Vera Stanhope. I'm obsessed with the series and it's faithful to the spirit of the book (even though although Brenda Blethyn manages to look dowdy as Vera she's certainly a lot more attractive than the Vera in the book!). In 1990, the museum conversion has been spotty. Marie (Marika) Delmas arrives and joins a tour of the house with Ottilie and her son Charlie, but does not recognize them. She recalls her mother Kata, and tells Ottilie she used to live there.The childhood friends finally recognize each other and are reunitedin the Glass Room. In the second half of the novel, Mawer rotates several different casts through the Landauers' home, using the glass room to examine people entirely unlike the original owners. In one of the most chilling sections, a German geneticist sets up his laboratory in the abandoned house and hopes the light of science will confirm Hitler's racial propaganda. His work is peaceful -- lots of careful measuring and photographing, "the cool gaze of scientific objectivity" -- but that only renders the whole enterprise more obscene. And like everyone else who lives in this glass room, he finds that such bright exposure makes him more determined to conceal the darkest aspects of his life. Je mi to opravdu líto, ale tohle prostě není kniha pro mě. Kdybych to věděla, tak jsem si ji půjčila z knihovny a nekupovala jí. A teď nevím, jestli se mám ještě do nějakého Mawera pouštět (ale třeba to časem s něčím z knihovny ještě zkusím.) The Landauers, a recently married couple, commission German architect Rainer von Abt to build a modern house in Brno (Czechoslovakia). The Landauer House, based on the Villa Tugendhat, becomes a minimalist masterpiece, with a transparent glass room as its center. World War II arrives, and they must flee the country, with their happiness and idealism in tatters. As the Landauers struggle abroad, their home passes through several new owners, with each new inhabitant falling under the spell of the glass room.The Glass Room is the fifth book in Ann Cleeves’ Vera Stanhope series – which is now a major ITV detective drama starring Brenda Blethyn as Vera. Viktor’s side of the family is Jewish, and he recognizes that that they must flee the country during the lead-up to World War II. The first part is focused on the Landauer family. It then portrays what happens to the house during and after WWII, including the initial caretakers, a Nazi laboratory, and a children’s hospital. Basically, the reader watches through the glass panes to witness the lives of everyone who lives in, works in, or has close ties to the house. In his novel, The Glass Room, Simon Mawer starts with a picture of privilege. Through that he explores human relationships, families, history, sexuality and change, to list just a few of the elements and themes that feature. Not only does he blend these and other penetrating ideas, he also consistently and utterly engages the reader, draws the observer in so effectively that sometimes the experience is participatory. The Glass Room is a novel that succeeds on so many levels that it becomes hard to review. The only comment is that you should read it. There’s nothing better than a good plot twist. One dealing with the forensics of the murder is even more clever. There is, however, one significant problem; the author/editor couldn’t seem to decide on the manner by which the first victim died. This could rather throw one out of the flow of the story. Still, the plot twists are well spaced and very well done. As should be, one doesn’t see them coming, but they are very effective when they do. There is very good drama and suspense. In the end, all the questions are answered.

The house is envisioned as: “Space, light, glass; some spare furniture; windows looking out on a garden; a sweep of shining floor; white and ivory and the gleam of chrome.” It is intended to symbolize rationality, science, and the spirit of a new post WW I world where reason and democracy would prevail, whether one was German, or Jew, or Czech. But the dream is shattered just as the glass shattered as the Soviets approached to "liberate" Czechoslovakia.

But human beings are not straightforward, Herr Stahl," says a character in this book. "They are very complex." (p. 244) The Glass Room by Siman Mawer is about a glass room in a house and the people who inhabit it over the years. It is about the Landauer family and the architect they hire to build the house, Ranier von Apt, who is loosely based on Mies van der Rohe. This house is to be different from any other – one built from the inside out and with “a living space that changes functions as the inhabitants wish”. The judging panel consisted of Geoff Bradley (non-voting Chair), Lyn Brown MP (a committee member on the London Libraries service), Frances Gray (an academic who writes about and teaches courses on modern crime fiction), Heather O'Donoghue (academic, linguist, crime fiction reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement, and keen reader of all crime fiction) and Barry Forshaw (reviewer and editor of Crime Time magazine). During the pause between world wars, a Jewish businessman and his new wife commissioned a startlingly modern house for themselves in Czechoslovakia. They hired the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and gave him free rein to design an avant-garde structure that looks like a Mondrian painting in three dimensions: a long, low building of dramatic straight lines, marked by a large room with floor-to-ceiling glass walls. Unbelievably, this elegant house survived the dismemberment of the First Republic of Czechoslovakia, German bombing, Soviet invasion and the natural forces that conspire against a neglected building. The Villa Tugendhat, which has been a public museum since the mid-1990s, remains a masterpiece of minimalist architecture, and now it's the evocative setting for a stirring new novel that almost won this year's Booker Prize. O dear. A difficult one to rate. Another book which I suspect will get me slightly into trouble when discussing this in the next meeting of my real life reading group – in that sense reminding me of what happened when we did read The Invisible Bridge last year. Seeing many readers liked this book, again it must be me. This time the biggest chunk of the novel is not set in Budapest but in the Czechoslovakian city of Brno (Město (‘Place’) in the novel) more specifically revolving around a modernist villa – the (still existing) Villa Tugendhat) – which is transformed into the villa of the fictional family Landauer in the novel – designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (‘Rainer von Abt’ in the novel). Maybe typically for historical fiction – I am not sure as not having read much in the genre – the novel mixes fact and fiction, for instance mentioning real facts from Mies van der Rohe’s life, like his departure to the US in 1938, or by introducing the Czech composer Vítězslava Kaprálová as a character, while other elements are entirely fictional (the real commissioners of the building were both Jewish and active in the textile industry (wool) and trade, while the family Landauer at the core of the novel got wealthy by car manufacturing, father Viktor is Jewish but mother Liesel is not). Spanning the interbellum years, the Nazi occupation, the communist period until its current destination as a museum, the house and its subsequent functions structure the plot over sixty years, as a place bringing the characters together over a few generations.

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. When they make it into a film, which they will, they'll ruin it. A different take on WWII Nazi occupation than I’ve read before. The main character is basically a house; a massive, uber-modern, glass and chrome house in Czechoslovakia. A young, wealthy honeymooning couple has it built shortly after their wedding but once Nazis invade they must emigrate and abandon their home. It’s later taken over by various factions and people.

Viktor Landauer, for instance is a planner. In a scene with his mistress, now also nanny to his children, he knows that ‘whether it is going to go wrong is not up to her or him. The wrongness or rightness of the future is the matter of the purest contingency. Viktor has always worked on the principle that the principle is there to be handled, manipulated, bent and twisted to one’s own desires but now he knows how untrue that is. The future just happens. It is happening now, the whole country poised for disaster; it is happening now, his standing there confronting Kata’ (p168) I am a poet of space and form. Of light' -- it seemed to be no difficulty at all to drag another quality into his aesthetic -- 'of light and space and form. Architects are people who build walls and floors and roofs. I capture and enclose the space within.'"(p 16)

Ann is the author of the books behind ITV's VERA, now in it's third series, and the BBC's SHETLAND, which will be aired in December 2012. Ann's DI Vera Stanhope series of books is set in Northumberland and features the well loved detective along with her partner Joe Ashworth. Ann's Shetland series bring us DI Jimmy Perez, investigating in the mysterious, dark, and beautiful Shetland Islands... By classic Booker, I mean : well structured plot, great writing style, some unpredictability , memorable characters and , usually, but not all the time, a historical setting. Glass Room has it all. That year the shortlist was a particularly strong one so anyone of these titles were contenders.V. recalls seeing Benno when they were serving in the military leading up to WWI. They were like robots. L. and Kata play with their children. Martin is 5 y/o. V. longs for Kata, writes her anote. But the relationships of those associated with the house all come to involve concealments and deception, and there are shadows of real nastiness in its wartime uses. This imagery is repeated throughout the book, and what I initially found intriguing became tedious.