<p>Very interesting point about the possibility of Marie being Viktor’s daughter…in my own mind I dismissed it entirely! All part of the confusion…</p>
<p>NJTM: Oops, I need to make myself clearer. When I posted “other men friends - maybe no” … well, I meant since Kata has other men friends, it muddies the paternity issue … so “maybe no” to Viktor as father.</p>
<p>Since Mawer never addresses the matter (with only a vague hint at paternity … or not), it becomes a non-issue.</p>
<p>I didn’t notice the tense changes, either. I did notice a lot of references to the present and future and an avoidance of the past. Viktor and Liesel were a modern couple with a futuristic house. Viktor made cars, something very progressive for the time and typically moving forward. When he was in America he made boats. When he stood in his house looking out over the city he said it gave him the feeling of being on a ship. In exile he still wanted to only look towards the future. Exile was the time that I noticed Leisel starting to look back, wanting what she had, and fearing the future. It was their life during the first war that made them not want to look back. Too much loss and sadness.</p>
<p>I was also confused by the concept of love that Mawer apparently wants to drive home. Through Zdenka, he writes, “You can love one person one way and another person another way and your store of love, all the different loves, is never diminished.”</p>
<p>I wanted this to register an emotional punch, offer a heart to the novel, but then I started questioning again. How can all of this universal love be so expansive when it is not responsible and can hurt others? Is Mawer trying to justify his characters’ actions? It didn’t resonate with me.</p>
<p>Here I am - my first time on since my questionable post, but I do want to apologize, even a few pages later, to BC. What I was saying was absolutely not an insult, and I’m sorry if it came off as possibly sarcastic. I agree with Mary that sometimes we read books we don’t like, but we’re not sorry we read them, because they make us think about a subject or an idea or even why we didn’t like it. I appreciate that.</p>
<p>Books that make us think are valuable. Getting a chance to discuss them with interesting people is very enjoyable. I appreciate being part of this group.</p>
<p>^And we’re glad you’re with us! </p>
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<p>A non-issue in terms of plotting, but significant in terms of characterization. The fact that Viktor never asks the simple question, “Is she mine?” speaks to his coldness. If you wanted to defend Viktor, I suppose you could say he never asked because he knew the timeline wasn’t right, but he doesn’t strike me as a guy who would be sensitive to the calendar in that way. </p>
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<p>This is true and it bothered me because I think you have to throw Stahl into the mix of cold men who use women. Then that begs the question…are all three the same at the core? Is there a buried racist rapist inside Viktor and Tomas? What is Simon Mawer saying about men? Wouldn’t the men we love be appalled by the depiction of their gender in this book? I think they would be, and rightly so.</p>
<p>Also, I want to add that the rape scene bothered me—not only for the obvious reason of reading about violence against a woman, but also because it revealed some of the weaknesses of the book. First of all, it played into the stereotype of a Nazi being an inhuman animal. Racist? Check. Rapist? Check. Anti-Semite? Check. Misoygynist? Check. Psychopath? Check. Now I’m no Nazi apologist, but I believe people are complex—the nature of good and evil is complex—and I didn’t like Stahl being turned into a cookie cutter Nazi. Secondly, the scene didn’t play out in a way that fit Hana’s character. Coming to him as a bedraggled beggar asking for money seemed very unlike her, no matter her level of desperation.</p>
<p>Thanks, EmmyBet. I apologize back for misinterpreting your comment and also for posting about it on the thread. It was a knee-jerk reaction and I should have just sent you a pm.
Okay, let’s all get back to the book!</p>
<p>ETA - Oh good, I see Mary is already back to the book. ^</p>
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I was talking about the book with my husband. He was surprised when I told him the author was a man.</p>
<p>I also found the rape scene to be a haunting scene in the book. Haunting and not necessary.</p>
<p>I need to go back to the source material, but my impression when reading the rape scene was that Hana shrugged it off, which did not make sense.</p>
<p>^ “Why didn’t you ask? Why did you have to hit me? If you’d asked I’d have let you do it.” (p. 281)</p>
<p>I was put off by that response–it was almost a justification of Stahl’s actions.</p>
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<p>I noticed the tense changes. A cursory glance through the book tells me that, in general, the present tense is used for action inside the Glass House, whereas the past tense is employed for life outside the house. </p>
<p>The early chapters of the book are in the past tense, but as the glass house takes shape, the present tense becomes primary. This dovetails with Viktor’s statement, “all this…this clinging to the past. This is everything our new house will not be!” (p. 9). Sure enough, after Chapter 10, “Completion,” the present tense takes over for chapters 11-19, which focus on the Landauer family’s home life. Chapter 20 is in the past tense (Viktor’s trip to Vienna), as is Chapter 21 (in the Caf</p>
<p>I could be rethinking my position on whether Marika is Viktor’s daughter. The first time he meets Kata, he wants her to spend the night but she can’t and that if she had known she could “have made arrangements”. The next time she says she can spend the night because she made arrangements. What would she have to arrange if not the care of her infant daughter?</p>
<p>^^^</p>
<p>I’ll rethink my position along with you: good catch.</p>
<p>Question #10. What image or scene within the novel haunted or stayed with you the most?</p>
<p>1.) Kata and Marika stopped at the border … though I expected something like this to happen. </p>
<p>2.) Stahl making the call to have Hana picked up as subversive: crueler even than the forced sex.</p>
<p>What stayed with me was the fact that Hana saw that other pregnant prisoners had been able to have their babies, and that her infant’s death was because of bad luck and timing. I saw a productions of Diary of Anne Frank soon after reading this book, and it always strikes me how one tiny little difference - a word, a minute, a morsel of food - meant life or death in a concentration camp.</p>
<p>Greetings All- sorry to say I’m still reading this book, trying not to read all the posts, but did read emmybet’s wonderful first post!
Want to join others in welcoming you to CC discussions.
Have to get back the book … Carry on
It’s extremely discouraging to know that Mawer only superficially deals with the Holocuast. How is this possible?</p>
<p>Sadly, even the babies who stayed with their mothers seemingly did not live long. Per Hana, “Later on they had a maternity hut and women were allowed to keep their babies for as long as they could. As long as they lasted” (p. 371). </p>
<p>Hana was in Ravensbruck:</p>
<p>[Ravensbrück[/url</a>]</p>
<p>[url=<a href=“http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/ravensbruck-womens-concentration-camp]Ravensbruck”>Ravensbruck Women's Concentration Camp | Jewish Women's Archive]Ravensbruck</a> Women’s Concentration Camp | Jewish Women’s Archive](<a href=“http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Ravensbruck.html]Ravensbrück[/url”>History & Overview of Ravensbrück)</p>
<p>I am very glad that I read this book. I did not like any of the characters but I did care what happened to them in the horror-filled months of the Nazi takeover.
Do you think Kata came by accident to the Glass House or did she know beforehand who owned the house?
I found the depiction of the Nazi doctor quite chilling. I found it a little unbelivable that Hana would have an affair with him-and attend the theater etc with him.
I felt like Hana was written like a rakish man who has a woman in every port-I dont’ think the author understands women.
I had more sympathy for Kata-as she truly was trying so hard to just survive.
With all the above reservations, I did feel drawn in by the book. And glad to have read it. THanks for all the great comments and linkes.</p>
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<p>Aha, I think you’re correct about this as a general pattern, Mary…but I believe I have found another pattern in the tenses as well.</p>
<p>I happened to notice that in the short chapter “Recital” (p.99), Mawer suddenly switched tenses in the last paragraph of the chapter. He had been describing a charity concert in the glass room using the present tense, but then he began the final paragraph like this:</p>
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<p>In that paragraph, he went on to describe things that were happening in the world outside the glass house, and in the life of the family, all in the past tense.</p>
<p>In the chapter “Birth” (p. 84), Mawer wrote in the present tense about Liesel being pregnant and about a visit by Viktor to Kata in Vienna. Then quite suddenly, right in the middle of the chapter, he made a change to the past tense when he told us about the birth of Martin…and the remainder of the chapter was in the past tense.</p>
<p>It seems like Mawer tended to use the present tense for scenes of greater immediacy, switching to the past tense when he was filling us in on the characters’ history in a more general way, or when he was making authorial statements about architecture, history, etc.</p>
<p>I don’t feel that these transitions were particularly graceful. The awkward changes in tense, combined with Mawer’s strange metaphors and similies, resulted in a few too many “huh?” moments for me.</p>
<p>PATheaterMom, I think Kata’s turning up at the house with the refugee group was supposed to be a complete coincidence. It was a ridiculously contrived occurrence, in my opinion.</p>
<p>I had a similar feeling of disbelief when Kata showed up. It would have been very difficult for her to end up there on her own. It did bother me that she didn’t know Viktor’s last name. Didn’t he write her a check from his bank? I assume his name was on the check and he also signed the check with his name. She should have known his last name and made the connection with the car company.</p>