Books like The Glass Room

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. The Glass Room with the onyx wall in the thirtiesWhat struck me in this novel? Rather flat, cardboard characters tied up by superficial relationships; clumsily written erotic scenes [I lost count of the descriptions of nipples, genitals likened to mushrooms, body orifices and scenes like ‘She moves her legs apart. The scent is almost overwhelming (…). Hesitantly he tastes the strange flavours, the dark mystery of the Slavic Scham, the shame that is always there, the bearded mouth that seems, even as he kisses it, to poke its insolent tongue out’ (ok, I admit this is the evocation of the experience of a Nazi scientist character fixated on purity!); I guess the reader’s appreciation of many of similar detailed descriptions is a matter of personal taste (ahum), though it amuses me Mawer’s writing on desire and sex was praised in that respect to be unlike traditional British writing on the subject, while to me it came across as pretty old-fashioned). Some of these passages and particularly the repetitiveness of it are that burlesque/silly they appear like a parody despite the deep seriousness of the book; less funny I thought the author seems to project the most clichéd male fantasies and gender caricatures on his characters (Sapphic tendencies popping up in long-time friendships when the women discover their husband’s/lover’s infidelity; suggesting it is the spouse’s refusal of oral sex that drives her husband into the arms of a prostitute…)]; careless mentioning of ‘conversations on art and music’, this all larded with German and Czech expressions and words (to paint the authentic feel of the cultural amalgam central Europe was?); the (inevitable?) story background of WWII and the Holocaust – and evidently numerous descriptions on the interior of the villa and especially that titular glass room with the onyx wall in it, symbolising freedom, ratio and transparency embodying the life of the commissioners and all secrets and lies that will be revealed in the room – which after a while turned fairly repetitive, slogging through the same scenes ad nauseam in which we are supposed to marvel at the particular impressive breaking of the light, followed by another ode on glass, chrome, linoleum, concrete and whiteness. On the plus side, the novel is, despite its volume and the weight of the historical background, a quick and remarkably breezy read that doesn’t eat up that much of one’s time or heart – a reassuringly moderate dose of casualties striking the protagonists. Maybe I am simply too cynical to sympathize with what seem to me the crazy rich people issues of the central couple of the novel – how outrageous they don’t have restaurant car in the Swiss train bringing them to Spain! Mama, the milk turned sour! – exile is a gruesome fate, evidently, but depicting exile in this incredible luxuriant conditions renders it into a kind of suffering hard to empathize with bearing in mind the plight of the ones who couldn’t escape so easily. Probably lovers of historical fiction or architecture buffs will get more out of this, but an overdose of (unintentionally) laughable scenes (the dance scenes of Zdenka!) made it hard for me to consider ‘The Glass Room’ a work that surpasses the guilty pleasure of browsing through the glossy pages of a lifestyle magazine.