The Glass Room

The Glass Room

Simon Mawer

Language: English

Pages: 406

ISBN: 1590513967

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


A New York Times Best-Seller

Honeymooners Viktor and Liesel Landauer are filled with the optimism and cultural vibrancy of central Europe of the 1920s when they meet modernist architect Rainer von Abt. He builds for them a home to embody their exuberant faith in the future, and the Landauer House becomes an instant masterpiece.  Viktor and Liesel, a rich Jewish mogul married to a thoughtful, modern gentile, pour all of their hopes for their marriage and budding family into their stunning new home, filling it with children, friends, and a generation of artists and thinkers eager to abandon old-world European style in favor of the new and the avant-garde. But as life intervenes, their new home also brings out their most passionate desires and darkest secrets. As Viktor searches for a warmer, less challenging comfort in the arms of another woman, and Liesel turns to her wild, mischievous friend Hana for excitement, the marriage begins to show signs of strain. The radiant honesty and idealism of 1930 quickly evaporate beneath the storm clouds of World War II. As Nazi troops enter the country, the family must leave their old life behind and attempt to escape to America before Viktor's Jewish roots draw Nazi attention, and before the family itself dissolves.

As the Landauers struggle for survival abroad, their home slips from hand to hand, from Czech to Nazi to Soviet possession and finally back to the Czechoslovak state, with new inhabitants always falling under the fervent and unrelenting influence of the Glass Room. Its crystalline perfection exerts a gravitational pull on those who know it, inspiring them, freeing them, calling them back, until the Landauers themselves are finally drawn home to where their story began.

Brimming with barely contained passion and cruelty, the precision of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession, and the fear of failure - the Glass Room contains it all.

The Windmill Girls

Polikarpov I-15, I-16 and I-153 Aces

Auschwitz Death Camp

Caen: Anvil of Victory

Unpatriotic History of the Second World War

British Tanks: 1945 to the Present Day: Rare Photographs from Wartime Archives

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

they smile self-consciously while Ottilie says, ‘You can’t smile on demand,’ and the camera snaps at them in the manner of an ill-tempered instructor saying ‘I told you so.’ Viktor gets up to reset the machine. ‘One more. And this time we must try to keep still and look natural.’ ‘Looking natural’s not natural,’ Ottilie insists. Martin laughs. The camera begins to buzz and Viktor settles back in his chair. ‘Now,’ he says. What the camera sees, what it preserves for posterity, is Viktor in a

trying to get home and you couldn’t get any information. My own family had left Moravia anyway, and my husband’s were all killed. They were Jews, you see, Mr Veselý. They died in the camps – Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka. And then the Iron Curtain came down and it was as though the whole country had vanished. We couldn’t hope to find out anything more. And now she’s alive.’ There was a silence. Veselý watched the Landors trying to come to terms with this piece of their past. During the war his

have any other family?’ Kata shrugs. ‘I haven’t seen them for years. I was the black sheep who ran away to the big city.’ Liesel turns to Viktor. ‘I thought of the chata. What do you think?’ He stares at her, his mind blank. ‘The chata? What do you mean?’ ‘It’s just a hut really,’ Liesel explains to Kata. ‘We used it as a kind of hideaway when we were children but when I had scarlet fever as a child I actually stayed in it with a nurse. So that Benno wouldn’t catch it.’ ‘Benno?’ ‘Benno was

Let’s talk about people.’ ‘We are talking about people,’ Oskar insists. ‘Politics is people.’ ‘How’s your refugee lady?’ Hana asks, ignoring her husband. ‘Katalin?’ ‘It’s Katalin now, is it? Should I be jealous?’ ‘Don’t be silly, darling. She’s a common little thing but really quite bright. And tough. When you think what she’s been through. She has done some wonderful work for me. You know she used to work for Habig? Making hats. And then dressmaking with Grünbaum or someone. One of those

you.’ He looked round at the long colonnades of the Piazza, at a couple of children immersed in a fluttering cloud of pigeons and being photographed by a commercial photographer with a massive mahogany box camera. Beyond them were the ornate domes of the Basilica with its mosaics and prancing horses. He gestured towards the scene, as though somehow it had been laid on for his own purposes. ‘Here, in the most ornamental city in the whole world, I am offering you the very opposite.’ And at his

Download sample

Download

About admin