The prose is beautiful, but this novel about how the Holocaust has shaped our modern lives is sometimes so hard to follow in a linear fashion, it becomes bewildering
August 21, 2025 17:22
There is the seed of a brilliant novel in Stuart Nadler’s Rooms for Vanishing. His premise is this: a Jewish family of four is ripped apart in Vienna on the outbreak of war.
In four separate speculative strands, we follow each of them as the unit’s sole survivor throughout the 20th century, haunted by the ghosts of their mother or father, husband or wife, sister or brother. Each indelibly scarred by loss and grief, in their own way. Four stories, in four realities, separated forever.
“I knew the truth of it, that everyone had been survived into different futures and that I would never see any of them again,” one character explains. “I would hear them in their separate rooms, within their separate lives, but I would not be able to cross over.”
It’s a tantalising proposition – the ultimate “what if”, yet with no catharsis because if one survives the others cannot (and yet, you hope…). We meet the quartet at different junctures. Daughter Sonja, the wife of a successful musician in 1970s London, a Kindertransport survivor with no tangible connection to her early life and more loss to confront in her present. Father Arnold, an old man in Vienna with ghosts circulating. Mother Fania, now a lonely masseuse in Montreal, on the cusp of a second chance of happiness. Finally, baby Moses, a grandfather himself as New York ushers in a new century, grappling with recollections of his youthful activism during the Prague Spring.
The Holocaust, while ever-present, is only the prologue; Nadler’s focus is on the next chapter in a Jewish family’s journey.
The writing is wonderful, more poetry than prose. The novel largely comprises beautiful vignettes about love, death and life. Nadler, with two prior novels under his belt, writes in a lyrical, gorgeous way. “Baby Moses, my small heartbeat come to life,” Fania thinks, of her lost son. “Moses, whose whole life was nothing but his being immersed in me, immersed in my breathing, never far from that drumming of mine, a fact that comforts me on nights when there is no comfort. That all his life he has known almost only one thing, which was the sound of his mother. He was pried from me.”
Yet as a novel, it’s bogged down by its ambitious concept. Each character is unravelling: they have no grip on reality and therefore neither does the reader. Scenes fold into each other, even characters’ inner monologues seem unreliable, and time appears fluid. The novel is evasive, even at times bewildering. Are they all dead? Is Nadler positing an idea of parallel universes? Is anything we read meant to represent reality? It’s elegantly constructed, but hard to follow in a linear fashion. Perhaps in the end it is best read as a series of meditations on how the Holocaust has shaped modern life and how death is not the end.
Rooms for Vanishing by
Stuart Nadler
Picador
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