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Other Press
October 2009
On Sale: October 20, 2009
Featuring: Viktor Landauer; Liesel Landauer
416 pages
ISBN: 1590513967
EAN: 9781590513965
Paperback
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Fiction Family Life
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.
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