Rooms for Vanishing
A Novel
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A prismatic mind-bending epic about the splintering of a family into different worlds
Everyone had been survived into different futures and I would never see any of them again. I could sense this. I would hear them in their separate rooms, within their separate lives, but I would not be able to cross over to meet them.
In Rooms for Vanishing, the violence of war has fractured the universe for the Altermans, a Jewish family from Vienna. Moving across decades, and across the world, the novel finds the Altermans alone in their separate futures, haunted by the loss of their loved ones, each certain that they are the sole survivor of their family.
Sonja, the daughter, has gone in search of her husband, who has disappeared into London; Fania, the mother, is confronted with her doppelgänger in the basement of a Montreal hotel; Moses, the son, is followed by the ghost of his best friend; and, finally, Arnold, the father, dares to believe that his long-lost daughter might be alive after he receives a message from an Englishwoman claiming to be her.
Spellbinding and profound, Rooms for Vanishing is a singular work that explores how—amid profound loss and the madness of grief—ghosts are made momentarily real.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nadler (Wise Men) follows a Viennese Jewish family shattered by the Holocaust across four alternate timelines in his dazzling latest. In each of the four narrative threads, a different member of the Alterman family is the sole survivor. The first, set in 1979 London, focuses on Sonja, rescued from the war at age five by the Kindertransport train. She's married to Franz, a famous orchestra conductor, with whom she lost a young daughter to a terminal illness. Franz disappears after becoming convinced the girl is still alive. Nadler then turns to Sonja's mother, Fania, who survived a displaced persons camp somewhere in Europe and now works as a masseuse in 1966 Montreal. In the third timeline, Fania's younger son, Moses, an infant when the family was rounded up by the Nazis, narrowly escapes being killed during an anti-communist protest in 1960s' Prague. While Moses awaits the birth of his grandchild in 2000 New York City, the ghost of a friend begs him to return to Prague. The final iteration centers on Fania's husband, Arnold, who lives in Vienna in 2016. He receives a message from a woman claiming to be Sonja after she tracks him down via the DNA test he shared on an ancestry site. Throughout, Nadler beautifully conveys the ways in which his characters' sense of reality is distorted by their trauma. This is a wonder.
