Simon Mawer - The Glass Room

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009, Simon Mawer's immense novel revolves around The Glass Room, or, Der Glasraum: A modernist house resulting from an architect whose maxim is ornamentation is crime. The conception of the house happens when Victor (a Jew, who owns an automobile manufacturing company) and Liesel Landauer are gifted a plot of land by Liesel's parents, on their wedding. The parents suggest building a good and solid house; yet, Victor, looking into the future of Czechoslovakia, a young nation of hope, conceives a modernist house, without the fortresses, and gothic windows. He actively searches for an architect to undertake this commission, and while the young couple honeymoon in Vienna, they meet Rainer von Abt, a self-proclaimed poet of space and structure, who desires to take Man out of the cave and float him in the air; to give him a glass space to inhabit. And, so the the wondrous Glass Room is born.

Once completed, it had become a palace of light, light bouncing off the chrome pillars, light refulgent on the walls, light glistening on the dew in the garden, light reverberating from glass - a masterpiece created by von Abt for the Landauers. The time is 1930s though, and the nation of hope is soon going to find out that the future is not as optimistic as they foresaw.

As history unfolds, and Czechoslovakia is invaded by the Nazis, the young couple flee the country for Switzerland, where they hope to build a stable life, with their two children. The relationships that were initiated early on in the book: Victor's almst obsessive affair with a prostitute, and Liesel's close friendship with Hana (a "modern" non-orthodox vivacious character), run much stronger now, as Victor and Liesel drift apart, but remain married. These intense relationships and emotions carry the book for the most part.

However, the main protagonist of the book isn't any person, but The Glass Room itself. So, when the family flees, the focus shifts to the Nazi lab that is set up there, which runs "tests" on people, in order to prove that the Jews are indeed inferior to the Nazis. A new host of characters are introduced, who play their short part exceptionally well. Once the Nazis leave, Der Glasraum is owned by the Soviet, for their lodgings. And then, it becomes a children's hospital, and as before, a new host of characters are introduced. Finally, the Czechoslovakian state wants to take it over, and make it a museum.

One would think that the myriad of characters, plots and time-lines would make this book cluttered, and cliched; that it would run the risk of trying to be too profound; that the varying emotions and relationships would be overdone and hyperbolic. However, Mawer, via some artistry (or waving of the wand), manages to escape these criticisms for this absolutely fantastic book, with the atypical protagonist.

At the beginning of the book is an author's note, that reads The Glass Room is a work of fiction, but the house and its settings are not fictional. A little researching indicated that the house is based on Villa Tugendhat, designed by the German architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, in Brno. It was built between 1928 and 1930, and is said to be the icon of modern architecture.

Rating: A+

Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

This book is a novel in the form of variations. The various parts follow each other like the various stages of a voyage leading into the interior of a theme, the interior of thought, the interior of a single, unique situation, the understanding of which recedes from my sight into the distance. It is a book about laughter and about forgetting, about forgetting and about Prague, about Prague and about angels. That's how Kundera sums up his book, within the text, as he reflects on life, the characters he's created, and how we're all bound by just one thing: the past; which is why, the children are our future. "Children have no past, and that is the whole secret of the magical innocence of their smiles".

The book is divided into seven stories, each independent of one another, but for the fact that the stories are based in and around the same time and place: a Czech Communist state in the 1970s. It's a book about love, about losing, about moving on, about laughing, about philosophy.

I don't know what inspired this book, but it's beautifully written, and I challenge anyone to open a page and not find some quote, reflection or dialogue that completely blows your mind away. The stories are interesting, be it about Tamina, the young widower  who tries to recollect each and every memory of the 'happy' life she shared with her husband, or about litost (a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one's own misery); be it filial love and devotion, or about going to see an old loved one - who the protagonist has truly loved, but never admitted - for his lover's ugly; or, be it about poets getting drunk and talking through the night about nothing at all, but at the same time, talking about everything.

A poet's pride is not ordinary pride. Only the poet himself can know the value of what he writes. Others don't understand it until much later, or they may never understand it. So, it's the poet's duty to be proud. If he weren't, he would betray his own work.

Kundera's observations, as he creates his characters, and gives them life, adds to the charm, specially when he talks about Tamina - and literally dedicates this book to her (in the text itself), while she seems to be a fictional character, consumed by pain and a dire need to forget, and get away. Move on, if you like.

And then there's the misogyny. From the opening chapter, where Mirek is ashamed of his passionate love of Zdena, a woman few years his senior, only because Zdena was guilty of something differently serious. She was ugly, to later on, where a character defends rape, and almost discusses how beautiful it is - because, women are prone to saying 'no', by default, even if they mean yes. Yes, that made me wince.

It's also a book about sex, and seduction. Sometimes, the attempted seduction results in litost, and sometimes, it results in the girl going to the bathroom and throwing up.

Ironically enough, it's a sad, despondent book; beautifully written. It invokes pangs of sadness, moments of reflection, and it does beg the question: what will the future bring, and like children, will I be able to laugh and forget, instead of being weighed down by the past, and subsequently, forgetting to look to the future.

So far, it's the best book I've read this year.