<p>Hello, everyone. It’s nice to join in. </p>
<p>First, I’ll say how much I enjoyed Cloud Atlas. I look forward to reading it a couple more times and enjoying it even more. I’ve picked up some more of his books and am so glad to have been introduced to this great writer.</p>
<p>Now, about The Glass Room. I’ll agree with those who weren’t happy with the characters - I, too, found them one-dimensional and eventually caricatures. The most interesting one in my opinion was the architect, but apparently the author didn’t think so and dropped him off the face of the earth. </p>
<p>The story line and the conceit of everything revolving around this extraordinary house was really quite brilliant, except I was very unhappy with how it was executed. In particular, I have several strong issues with the author’s take on history:</p>
<p>1) He used the pre-WWII and the war years only at his own convenience. When he wanted menace, he had someone be a “mean Nazi.” When it was too hard to face what people really dealt with during that period, he made it too easy for someone to thwart the challenges. I cannot believe that this family was able to live where they lived and escape to where they escaped without suffering anything worse than the “boredom” of exile. I was particularly frustrated at the end that somehow Marie “survived,” but we are given no explanation of how she did or what it was like for her. It’s like he wasn’t interested any more in how people lived and who they were - just getting them to the house was supposed to be major excitement for the reader. </p>
<p>2) In many ways, as a Jew, I was insulted by the either quite unscathed, or simply undepicted, experiences of his characters - the only person whose “real” war and concentration camp experiences are described is the prominent non-Jew of the book. The fact that this Jewish family settled in the US during the war was quite improbable, no matter how rich they were. It just wasn’t that easy, and in the 60s they wouldn’t be so perfectly assimilated.</p>
<p>2) I wasn’t happy with his post-war depictions of what was then Czechoslovakia. I am no expert, but I did travel to what is now the Czech Republic in the 70s and met many people who experienced the '68 invasion and uprising. I thought this book completely ignored the real feelings of these people under Soviet oppression. When he chose to have events take place in 1968, I waited for that to have real meaning for these people - but it was like he hadn’t even researched it.</p>
<p>Just to give you a bit of what I experienced, I traveled through Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, through small towns and big cities, and had occasion to speak with many native people (I was on a bike, on a language-learning trip). We were told by our trip leaders to expect various responses to both the Soviet oppression and to our being Americans. The Poles in general seemed to be smiling through the storm, trying to make the best of things. Hungarians had maintained a significant barrier to Soviet influence, probably because of their unique language and culture. Romanians were under totalitarian rule, and we had to be very cautious with every step we took. The Bulgarians generally seemed happy to be dominated by the USSR. </p>
<p>But the Czechs: This is where there was open and profound anger at their oppressors. Frustration and deep pride was etched on virtually every face. Many of us happened to speak Russian, and even when we announced that we were Americans, people would literally turn their backs and refuse to communicate with us. On the other hand, there was great beauty and generosity - several of us needed various kinds of help while in Czechoslovakia, and the people, young and old, took great risks on our behalf.</p>
<p>I was terribly bothered that in this book, the characters’ focus during this terrible period in their history was not what was happening to their country and how their lives were being controlled, not even as a vivid backdrop to the personal stories. I think the author intended to portray a generational divide - the post-war “babies” who didn’t understand the severity of what had happened, and also perhaps he was interested in how even in the midst of great difficulty -war and oppression - people are still interested in home, in love, in family, and personal desires. But in order to make that point, he would have had to portray the great difficulties in a way that the reader understood their effect on these characters, rather than using them as an excuse for plot climaxes or extreme personalities. The Nazis’ gruesome experiments, the dragging away of people to concentration camps, the defamation of the house (if you even see it that was) as a hospital, and the reward-for-evil (as in the house’s caretaker) seemed only to be devices, not a compassionate portrait of an era that no European should ever see merely as convenient fodder for fiction.</p>