Rooms for vanishing A novel

Appearing almost a decade since The Inseparables (2016), Nadler's latest is another transgenerational novel, this time focused on the effects of trauma on a Viennese Jewish family torn apart during WWII. Sonja, Fania, Moses, and Arnold Alterman are separated in the narrative by time as sections shift between 1966 and 2016 and by space, with settings in Vienna, London, Montreal, New York, and Miami, with a sweeping scope reminiscent of Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See (2014). Each character has their own unique experience of dislocation, and each is searching for someone lost. Sonja, for example, is desperately chasing her mercurial and unwell husband Franz, a well-regarded conductor. Approaching trauma in flashes or indirectly, like D. M. Thomas' classic, The White Hotel, each section could almost be a novella, but they are united by a shared ethereal, troubling, and almost magical realist atmosphere. Nadler masterfully weaves ghosts, memories, and the exciting yet terrifying possibility they all feel at the prospect of seeing each other again into this oblique, unsettling, and profound exploration of trauma, grief, and familial bonds.

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. Agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Mar.)

A Holocaust-inspired saga of a family exploded by grief into the multiverse. Nadler's unusual and profoundly sorrowful novel begins with a section called "Kindertotenlieder" ("Songs on the Death of Children") set in 1979 London, where Sonja Alterman's orchestra conductor husband, Franz, has gone missing. He may be on the trail of a woman he believes to be their daughter, Anya, though Anya died years ago at the age of 9. That sort of thing stops no one in this book--Sonja herself died at age 5. Her parents put her on a Kindertransport out of Vienna but received word of her death even before they and her infant brother, Moses, were murdered by the Nazis. All three of them are alive, too, in one or more incarnations--her mother, Fania, works as a masseuse in a hotel in Mont her father will celebrate his 100th birthday waiting for the arrival of a different version of Sonja, an 83-year-old pen pal from Engl Moses becomes a grandfather himself in the year 2000, haunted by a different set of ghosts who inhabited the non-dead version of his life. Somehow, the rules of this radically splintered world are not firm enough to inspire investment in the unfolding stories. Everything is true at the same time everything is made-up. People are both there and not there, definitely coming and never showing up. DNA testing can confirm your genetic connection to a living person--but maybe that person isn't so alive after all. As one character comments, "I did not know that the dead could have children." This beautifully written, rather long book presents an existential question--is death real?--with many answers and no correct one. Give up on figuring things out to best appreciate Nadler's luxuriant storytelling and emotional intensity. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.