The Glass Room

by Simon Mawer

The Glass Room is an exercise in audacity. Instead of a conventional living room defined by walls, there is merely space and light enclosed by plates of glass.
It is the piece de resistance of a house that the German architect Rainer von Abt builds for Czech newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Landauer.
The whole-hearted embrace of modernity and the idea that one can shape one’s future seems incredibly naive, though, as the political maelstrom in 1930s Europe begins to churn.
Viktor is Jewish and Liesel Aryan, and when the Nazis sweep into power, they are forced to leave their Czech home and go into exile.
Mawer, however, is not interested in simply recounting the story of the Landauers against the backdrop of World War II. Instead, he treats the Glass Room as a central character as it passes through the hands of the Nazis to the socialist Czechs after the war.
The “cool, calm rationality” of the space is a stark contrast to the “irrationality that human beings would impose upon it”.
The clean, crisp prose here mirrors the modernist ideals of the Landauer House.
But there is nothing sterile or cold about Mawer’s writing and he conveys the emotions roiling just beneath the surface that threaten to, and sometimes do, crack the placid facade.
By setting the final, moving scene in the titular space, he imbues it with an unexpectedly tender note of benediction and grace, perhaps the most audacious qualities ascribed to a room of glass in the novel.
If you like this, read: To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s challenging exploration of childhood, adult relationships and the passage of time spans the period of World War I.

(ST)