<p>I read somewhere that we are less willing to accept coincidence in novels than we are in real life. We embrace them in reality, but reject them in fiction. Readers disdain coincidences that are employed solely as a device to move along a weak plot. Such cheap shortcuts are not to be confused with the coincidences that appear in many brilliant and intricately plotted literary works—Dickens, Hugo, Hardy, etc.—which operate on a different level. As one NY Times book critic described it, ”the outlandish symmetries that undergird Dickens’s novels, for instance, don’t so much close off his worlds as open them up to life’s marvelous possibilities.”</p>
<p>In my opinion, the coincidences of The Glass Room fall into the first category—cheap shortcut—rather than the second.</p>
<p>NJTheatreMOM, thanks for the additional analysis on tenses. I’ll give Mawer credit for attempting to add some layers to his work through the deliberate alternating of present and past, but I agree that it was rather awkwardly executed.</p>
<p>And he mentions the book’s description of the space, as Viktor and Liesel are leaving: “The cool, calm rationality of the place undisturbed by any of the irrationality that human beings would impose upon it.”</p>
<p>The characters were often irrational, as others have mentioned, and the historical time and place provide contrast with the “transparency” of the house as well.</p>
<p>One of the linked articles on the Radio Prague page points out that the glass room appears or is referred to in every chapter in the book. I hadn’t noticed that–although I did feel Mawer described the room a few too many times–but it seems to be the case (or at least the house is referred to in every chapter).</p>
<p>A few more links:</p>
<p>Villa Tugendhat just reopened to the public in March after a two-year renovation–the official site has great current photos, as well as older ones, historical info, and lots of other things:
[Introduction</a> | Vila Tugendhat](<a href=“http://www.tugendhat.eu/en/]Introduction”>VILLA TUGENDHAT - MIES VAN DER ROHE)</p>
<p>Also, I found that there’s a Kapralova Society to promote interest in her music (I found examples of the music on youtube):
[Vtezslava</a> Kaprlov / by KAPRALOVA SOCIETY](<a href=“http://www.kapralova.org/]Vtezslava”>http://www.kapralova.org/)</p>
<p>The comments on Mawer’s use of tenses are very interesting!</p>
<p>^Funny, I was able to accept Kata showing up at the House as a coincidence, but had more trouble accepting that Ottilie and Marika would show up randomly together at the end.</p>
<p>I’ve already stated that the thing that bothered me the most about the book was Mawer’s refusal to address the specifics of Kata’s fate. It ruined the final scene for me. As far as I’m concerned, it is emblematic of his failure to acknowledge the suffering that occurred during that era.</p>
<p>Apart from that, what lingers naggingly in my brain are some of Mawer’s unfortunate images. Am I a weirdo for this to bother me so much? Here are a few more of them:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>The appearance of the cathedral spires being compared to hypodermic needles (on p.2, and at least one other time). Ew.</p></li>
<li><p>In the first five pages of the book, Mawer’s using the word “jelly” in two squirm-inducing ways: “…all of it projected within the intricate jelly of her brain” (p.2) and “…the warmth within shivering like jelly against the wall of cold outside” (p.5).</p></li>
<li><p>Mawer’s description of the view from the Wiener Riesenrad: “…the crowds in the Haupt-Allee are like lice crawling across the back of a dusty animal.” (p. 101) Ew.</p></li>
<li><p>On p. 198, describing Liesel’s sex dream following the discovery of Viktor and Kata together: “…an audience that laughed and applauded as the protagonists performed, giving and receiving sperm that was like rice thrown at a wedding.” Holy Moly!!! Sperm like rice at a wedding!</p></li>
</ol>
<p>There are a several others that I can’t find right now. Mary cited a great example…the “squinting nipples” one. :D</p>
<p>Buenavista, I agree that the book is more the story of the house than of the family. The house has more personality, in its own way, than any of the characters!</p>
<p>Ah, philistine that I am, I had no idea Vitezslava Kapralova was a real person. Thank you for enlightening me!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Kata’s eyes. </p>
<p>But not for a good reason – rather, the image stayed with me because Mawer refused to let it go. For example:</p>
<p>“Her eyes were blue, so pale that they gave the curious illusion of transparency” (p. 56).
“Her eyes were so blue. He hadn’t remembered them that accurately. A blue that made them seem transparent, as though you were gazing through them to the horizon” (p. 69).
“When she looks up there is that glacial light in her blue eyes” (p. 102).
“Her eyes, those transparent eyes, move across the faces in the audience” (p. 137).
“Kata’s transparent eyes are turned on him, letting the sky into the room as clearly as the glass windows themselves” (p. 141).
“And those eyes, their startling pale blue, paler by far than the sky” (p. 202).
“…her cheeks white with cold and her blue eyes the colour of ice” (p. 236).
“Marie remembers her eyes, the light blue of the sky as it appears now over the castle hill in a break in the cloud” (p. 402).</p>
<p>After about the third or fourth description of Kata’s blue, transparent eyes, I grumbled about it to my 14 year old daughter, who was reading a book next to me. She responded, “Yeah, that’s annoying. It’s how Stephanie Meyer writes in Twilight.”</p>
<p>I see Viktor and Liesel as devoted to modernity only in an aesthetic sense, but not in others. And that goes for the house, too.</p>
<p>From a social class perspective the house has similarities with older houses of the wealthy–in particular, large public spaces that require staff to keep them up. And of course, about 30 average homes could have been built for the price. The glass room may have been transparent and open, but in the back were lots of servant spaces. The owners had two maids, a married chauffeur, and a nanny, and I think they all lived there.</p>
<p>Apparently the architectural review in Die Form mentioned on p. 79 of the book (“Is the Landauer House habitable?”) was a real review, and both owners wrote letters of rebuttal.</p>
<p>Buenavista, what an illuminating article. Thanks so much for posting it. </p>
<p>The Glass Room would have been much more interesting if Mawer had given more weight to both sides of the vigorous debate that developed over the house, instead of just going on and on about how wonderful it was. His reference to criticisms of the house on p. 79 was pretty dismissive.</p>
<p>The history in the article is fascinating…about how Czechoslovakia was much more prosperous than other former areas of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after WWI, about how Berlin was once called “the city of opal glass,” etc.</p>
<p>Mary13, I’m surprised that I also somehow failed to notice the references to Kata’s transparent eyes, especially since there are so many! </p>
<p>Maybe Viktor was attracted to Kata because she reminded him of his house…</p>
<p>Actually, that’s probably pretty close to the truth – or at least, it’s a reflection of Mawer’s idea that the Landauers are drawn to what is transparent (the house, Kata), while living a life of dissemblance.</p>
<p>In my mind, the greatest lack of transparency is the lie they all tell themselves about having been happy in the glass house. “We were so happy there,” Liesel tells Rainer many years later (p. 227). Hana makes a similar comment, “We were so happy…so very, very happy” (p. 364).</p>
<p>Really? I think those years included far too much infidelity, anger and tears to ever be deemed “very, very happy.” I am reminded of the line from St. Paul, “We see through a glass, darkly” – the characters cannot or will not look directly at their own histories for an accurate reflection of their lives. </p>
<p>I wonder if Mawer is slyly referring to this happy/unhappy dichotomy by titling one of his chapters, “Happy Families.” I couldn’t help but think of the opening line from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”</p>
<p>And then we get to hear all over again how Marika does not have her mother’s eyes!</p>
<p>I am confused about the courtship of Viktor and Liesel. We know Viktor became interested in Liesel after an encounter with Benno, who told Viktor his sister had a crush on him. Apparently, this is the first time he felt loved. But Liesel seems to reject his advances in the chata, and their honeymoon moment didn’t send off any sparks. So is Liesel the enamored young woman or is she more of a cool fish? It seems she does enjoy Viktor’s sensuality further in the book, but by this time he is already having an affair with Kata. </p>
<p>Another timing issue that confused me was when Liesel, after finding out about the affair during the exile in Switzerland, explained to Kata that she became detached from Viktor after the medical problems surrounding Martin’s birth. But Viktor seemed to feel more of a void after the birth of Ottilie, and seemed attracted to Kata for those clear eyes :rolleyes: and her childlike ways (the bitten fingernails). It seems childbirth is part of what separates them, but for each, it is a different child.</p>
<p>I can’t quite pin down what the author is trying to say about modernity. On the one hand, the glass house–the epitome of modernity–is the idol held up for admiration, with homage paid to its beauty, functionality, purity, and ability to survive.</p>
<p>On the other hand, modernity is repeatedly an instrument in the characters’ unhappiness:</p>
<p>The first time Victor and Liesel sleep together, “The experience was curiously dispiriting but it was, she supposed, rather a modern thing to do” (p. 10). </p>
<p>Ranier remarks that “the forces of modernity are being unleashed by Italian Fascism” (p. 12).</p>
<p>For Ottilie’s birth, “They had decided on the modern way, in a clinic run by Doctor Zivan Jelinke, a physican who had learned the Twilight Sleep technique under the tutelage of Gustav Gauss in Friburg.” Although the birth may have been painless for Liesel, it was also joyless, “any memory of the whole event excised from her mind by scopolamine, a drug culled from henbane and deadly nightshade that kills, among other things, memory; and into this chemical amnesia Ottilie was born” (p. 45).</p>
<p>It’s also worth noting that Zdenka’s dream had been to be a classical, old world ballerina, but she ends up a modern dancer – a path that isn’t as fulfilling.</p>
<p>There seems to be a lesson in there somewhere that modernity to the exclusion of all else is dangerous–that the old ways have value, and must be incorporated with the new.</p>
<p>Maybe Liesel is gay…in an era when one could never acknowledge such a thing. Perhaps that accounts for her lukewarm physical relationship with Viktor, her use of Martin’s birth as an excuse to curtail their sex life, and her strong attraction to Hana and Kata. I’m not sure if there would be a reason for that (thematically speaking), but Mawer’s characters are rather inscrutable, so who knows what he was thinking when he created them.</p>
<p>I did also think that Liesel could be gay.
It was funny how the author took the basic structure of the family who really lived in the house and changed their circumstances a bit and then added in tangled troubled relationships and infidelity. I wonder what they would think of the book if they were to read it.
EmmyBet, what years were you in Checkoslovakia? Your experience is fascinating.
Earlier this year I read a fantastic trilogy of world war II history written by Richard Evans. The historical events of that time and place are truly just so overwhelming-so tragic-so unbelivable.
I felt this novel had the events of that time a little bit removed from the main action. In contrast to other novels set in that time (The Invisable Bridge by Julie Orringer(?)) i found it hard to like the charactors-although what we all know about the times made me care very much about what happened to them.
As a side note, the love affair between Hana and the dancer at the end did not at all ring true to me. I had trouble believing Hana as a character throughout the book.
OT-but Wolfhal that was mentioned upthread is a great book!</p>
<p>Yes, I got this impression, too, that there is a price to be paid for all the modernity and forward thinking. There is a layer of superficality. Tomas, who only lives in the present, is not a very attractive figure emotionally, yet the author lets us know that Liesel finds him attractive (supeficially) when they meet in the Glass Room. We learn about Tomas’s philosophy of life through Dzendka, who spells it all out so completely, yet it does not seem believable that Tomas would have these intense kinds of conversations. I would have preferred to learn about him through example. </p>
<p>On a separate note, I am reminded of the myth of Ondine, which provided interesting symbolism, but again, I felt hit over the head by it.</p>
<p>I really liked Hana as a character, but the “if only you asked” comment after the rape (thanks, Mary, for digging it up) just lost it for me. I find this line inexcusable by Mawer. The announcement of her love for Dzendka was laughable to me. I almost didn’t want to finish the book, but I am glad I did. As I mentioned, I discovered that the radio address was Chamberlain’s real words, which lead to further reading on the Chamberlain/Churchill transition.</p>
<p>1. Why are the Landauers so devoted to modernity? What makes them so intent on shedding the past, and how is this tied to their country’s history or future?</p>
<p>I’ll hazard a guess that Viktor’s profession - automobiles - influences his love of the modern. Automobiles represent modernity for travel; Landauer House represents modernity of living.</p>
<p>Add the upheaval of the time and modernity (if you could afford it) looked good.</p>
<p>I also think the past holds heartache and sorrow, particularly for Liesel. Looking to the future helps with the past.</p>
<p>(That said, I think Viktor likes “coldness” of the house, as do the other interchangeable men that pass through it. As Hana points out, the house attracts a certain type of man: surely not a compliment to either man or house.)</p>
<p>I never thought of Liesel as gay (though maybe I should have). Liesel rebuffs Hana at first, seems surprised by the thought later - right before acquiescing. I think loneliness and need to be loved plays a part in her involvement with Hana; with Kata, I think Liesel aims for control/power over Kata (and Viktor). Hana - bisexual - definitely.</p>
<p>Does anyone remember a sentence in the book that said that although Viktor had lived with Liesel for many years, he didn’t really know what she looked like? I can’t find it now, but I’m sure I read it. It was odd.</p>
<p>So Kata had transparent eyes, and Liesel was invisible to her husband…and later blind. Hmm.</p>
<p>offhand, I remember the Viktor’s comment about finding Liesel attractive when she was getting dressed, while with Kata it was all about the undressing.</p>
<p>I found the passage I was thinking about. It’s on page 132:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This is after Viktor and Liesel have been married for many years…long enough that Martin is of an age when Ottilie can be “directing him in some complex game.”</p>
<p>Probably what Mawer meant was that Viktor never got tired of the way Liesel looked and/or never stopped finding her interesting and attractive…but he surely had a graceless way of expressing it. This was another of the “huh?” moments that I made little pencil marks in the margin about.</p>
<p>Thinking about the children…I don’t believe we were ever given any idea of what their personalities were like, were we? They were just little props.</p>