This Week's Hot Reads

This week: a haunting novel about a house that sees the tides of history, a new memoir-novel from Jeannette Walls, a powerful eyewitness account of the surge in Iraq, a new thriller from David Baldacci, and a manifesto for dealing with email.

The Glass Room. By Simon Mawer. 416 pages. Other Press. $14.95. The Glass Room
by Simon Mawer

A historical novel about a Jewish man and his gentile wife struggling to survive in 1930s Czechoslovakia.

In this 2009 runner-up for the Man Booker Prize, Simon Mawer depicts the difficulties of life for an interfaith couple trying to find solace and order in the frightening, chaotic times of 1930s Czechoslovakia. Newlyweds Viktor and Liesel Laudauer build a steel, glass, and onyx marvel high atop a Czechoslovak hill, a symbol of the sense of optimism prevalent in 1920s Central Europe. Soon, however, that sense of hopefulness changes to one of doom as the region enters World War II. Life turns upside down for Viktor, a rich Jewish mogul, and Liesel, a modern gentile, when the strain of war interferes and Viktor turns to another woman for comfort. As Nazi troops enter their country, the couple, along with Viktor’s lover and her son, is forced to flee to America. The modern marvel of a house they commissioned slips from Nazi to Soviet to Czechoslovak state hands, with the Glass Room of the house always providing a shelter from the storm of war for its inhabitant. Not until the collapse of communism can Viktor and Liesel finally return to their home. The Guardian calls Mawer’s book “a thing of extraordinary beauty and symmetry… a novel of ideas, yet strongly propelled by plot and characterised by an almost dreamlike simplicity of telling.”