“Separate rooms, like separate trains. I am on one side of the wall, you are on the other side of the wall. I am on one train, you are on the other train. What don’t you get, Mama? Separate rooms, separate trains”.

“Rooms for Vanishing”, by Stuart Nadler is filled with deep feeling. It’s an extraordinary good novel. Everyone who reads it will have a different moment when the characters become an irresistible force. …. as it’s a rare pleasure to spend time with an emotionally wrenching yet intellectually rigorous idea-driven puzzle-of-a-novel that keeps us readers off balance — keeps us pondering questions until the final pages.

Nadler, the phenomenal storyteller, covers decades of complicated idiosyncratic structure …..a wise and searching voice, sculpted deliciously….a series of embedded incidents that read like mystery.
“All of this business of anticipating the dead, putting one’s ear against the wall and expecting voices. I was always in the process of embarrassing myself, or revealing to myself some new territory embarrassment that I had not yet discovered. It was, others had told me, a problem of sensitivity, a problem of the times, a consequence of my personal history. I go back to these moments, if only to remind myself of what happened and what did not”.

The Alderman’s are a Jewish family from Vienna. War and grief has separated them. We follow them through decades. As we follow each family member — escaping Nazi terrifying tyrannization ….we, the reader, are uncertain, mystified even, as to who is alive, and who isn’t.
In no predicable order, we meet:
….Arnold Alderman….Father
….Fania Alderman….Mother
….Sonja….Daughter
….Moses….Son
We learn about each of these characters….(the how, the why, the sadness, fears & tears, their individual travel journeys, their beliefs, and the mystery).

“But how, I asked, does one assess your history without pain?”
“In the world to come, children are reborn with all the world’s knowledge. In the world to come, fathers fall forward to wrap the old kingdom in their arms. In the world to come, the blessings of our memories are collected like kite string and let loose into the new sky. In the world to come, I put my hand through the walls that keep us apart to touch my family”.

“He had wanted to make our loss everyone’s loss, to transfer his grief onto everyone as a way to diffuse it, to lessen its severity” ….
Death did not work that way.
Any hint of tragedy, darkness, misery, sadness, and grief…
everyone’s loss—would only
“put our loss into bodies of others —
— would only make that loss stronger.
Grief grew in darkness and in strangers, and in all the places we would never think to notice or to search. You could shine a light into all the corners of your life and never see it growing”.

The story begins in the summer of 1938 when Sonja leaves Nazi-occupied Austria to London on the Kindertransport.
Her parents Arnold and Fania, and baby brother, Moses, are left behind.
As far as Sonja knows, she is the only member of their family who survived.

Fania, believes she lost her entire family, too.
In 1966, we meet her working as a massage therapist in Montreal. She comes face-to-face with another woman who looks just like her: her doppelgänger. Between meeting her twin and haunting vibrations of the family she lost … (ghostly?) seeing and hearing them everywhere, it’s easy to consider she has lost her mind — or? is it possible they are still alive?

Arnold, who is ninety-nine years old …. still in Vienna …
received a letter from an English-woman claiming to be his long lost daughter Sonya.

Moses is haunted by the ghost of his best friend who was killed in Prague.
Moses goes to Prague — to make peace with the dead.

From the Second World War to 2016 …..(Vienna, London, Montreal, and Prague) ….
“Rooms For Vanishing” is a gripping puzzle-piece of a story … haunting, mysterious, and so gorgeously written … bridging the gaps between reality and hope, in the ways one can only imagine from depths of devastating exile.

Beautifully….brilliantly written….
For me, (being Jewish, carrying within pain and ugliness from horrors of my own Holocaust family history - and the nightmare tragedies between Israel and Gaza), I experienced truth and beauty ….as well as an optimistic tone of light and love in “Rooms for the Vanishing” that moved me — beyond resignation. I even laughed at times.

A real — accomplished beauty of a novel

While I can recognize some moments of beauty and wonder in this narrative, the vast majority failed to click with me on an emotional level. I found the story to be redundant in several areas and often overtly melancholic to the point that it ventured towards pretentiousness. For lack of a better term, it insisted upon itself too much. I can appreciate the underlying theme of grief and how it can literally change your brain chemistry and distort reality; however, the actual story just wasn't executed to its full potential. The writing itself, while occasionally poignant, was mainly clunky and confusing, with long run on sentences and chucky paragraphs that dilute the impact of what's being said. Also, I felt as if the four overarching stories were not given equal attention--for example, while Sonia's story was rich and interesting, the description of Arnold's life and losses barely scratched the surface. It would have been more impactful to focus an entire novel on just one (maybe two) of the family members so their story could be fleshed out even further. Overall, the message of the book is one worth telling, I just wish it was brought to life in a different way.

There are a number of adjectives I could use to describe this brilliant novel: profound, thought-provoking, mind-bending, enlightening, and even dazzling. I could just as easily call it mystifying, bewildering, and enigmatic. In its style, approach, and creation, it is truly sui generis.

This prismatic epic focuses on the Altermans, a Viennese family of four. Sonja, the young daughter, is sent on the Kindertransport to Britain by her parents when to keep her safe from the encroaching Nazi threat to Austrian Jews. She believes that her parents, Fania and Arnold, and her baby brother Moses, were all murdered soon thereafter.

But did they miraculously escape, and are they really alive? Is she, in fact, alive? Or is the world a series of revisions, with God always in the process of making and unmaking it? Is our world constantly undergoing creation, destruction, and re-creation? Are we simply picked up out of history and replaced with nothing with a wall between ourselves and our lives?

At first, we believe the separate narratives that are relayed separately by each family member. Fania, Sonja’s mother, is in Montreal, paired with a man named Hermann, with whom she practices English when she chances upon her doppelganger, whose life is nearly identical to hers. Then there’s Arnold, the father, who is one year from his 100th birthday, who meets a woman he has never seen before. Within minutes of meeting her, everything, forever, becomes different for him. Baby Moses has also been allowed to grow up and is followed by the ghost of his best friend. Sonja herself is a musicologist whose husband, a conductor of some renown, goes missing in London. That is if Sonja is truly corporeal.

Each alone in their separate futures, which may or may not exist, each in a new version of themselves, and each struggling with dealing with unspeakable loss, the members of the Alterman family impossibly yearn for a future where the unspeakable has not occurred. Stuart Nadler writes, “Everyone has been survived into separate 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 never be able to cross over to meet them.”

Is that what profound grief is all about? Choosing different futures for those whom we have lost? Creating different versions of them when we are no longer able to create memories? Using our story-making powers to liberate loved ones from an undeserved history? Consistently being forced to recall that those we love are not here but vanished in rooms that make them unreachable? The author asks how it is possible to be dead and alive at the same time. “Only great geniuses have that ability. Or great monsters.” To which he might have added: “Or those whose grief twists us into believing in the impossible.”

This isn’t an easy read, but it’s well worth the effort. I owe thanks to Dutton for providing me with an early copy in exchange for an honest review.

I wrestled with myself for days about how to review this novel, rolling the stories around in my head. It's not like anything I've ever read before, like a puzzle that will break your heart. Let me try to explain how I think this book works and how it impacted this reader.

Sonja Alterman is sent to Britain on the Kindertransport with the belief that her family will follow. They do not. She marries a respected conductor and they have a daughter who dies at age nine. Her husband sees a photo of a woman he believes is their daughter, grown, and disappears.

There were four members of the family and we will meet all of them as if they lived, and perhaps they have. Mother Fania is in Montreal where she meets a woman who may be herself, or someone who moved into their Viennese apartment after her family was deported. Arnold is turning 99. a friend encourages him to take a DNA test, and he is contacted by a woman who says she is his daughter, Sonja. Moses was a baby when the family was taken, and now he is shadowed by a ghost who asks to be taken back to Prague where he can rest.

Are any of these people alive, or is this story about the madness of grief? What kept me turning the pages is the gorgeous writing and the hope that somehow, this family can connect, that someone will learn that they are not alone.

The story moves across time periods, generally following one societal upheaval or another. It is filled with aching hope and despair and some of it is hard to take. But Rooms for Vanishing is a remarkable achievement. Even writing this review gives me chills.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.