Rooms for Vanishing - Hardcover

Nadler, Stuart

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593475461 ISBN 13: 9780593475461

Verlag: Dutton, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

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.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Stuart Nadler is a recipient of the 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation, and the author of two novels, Wise Men and The Inseparables, and a story collection, The Book of Life. His work has been named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, and an Amazon Book of the Year. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow and a Teaching-Writing Fellow. He teaches creative writing at Boston College and is a member of the faculty of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives in New England.

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Kindertotenlieder

London, 1979

Sonja

Oh, I had tried to reach her before. That was never the problem. I was always trying to reach her, to talk with her, to be nearer to her, to experience her visitations more completely, but when I grew close, which I often did, she wasn't there. If anyone ever bothered to ask me what happened then in the darkness as I lay waiting for my child to come home, to return to me, to appear to me as she had in life, I would have told that person the truth, which is that she goes away, she goes, she goes.

As she should have. I never expected otherwise. Not really.

The truth was that she had been going from the moment she was first here with me. When she was born, she was calm, like a woman in middle age having already been told the terrible news: this is life, beware, no one gets out unscathed. On the morning of her ninth birthday I found her outside in the sun speaking aloud to someone who wasn't there, and when she came inside finally, after an hour of this, she told me it was my mother she was speaking to, my first mother, shot dead beside a train in a forest nine hundred and ninety miles northwest of my house in London, and that my mother had been asking after my well-being, that she had come to talk after all this time among the dead, and my daughter told my mother that she was looking after me, but not for long, others would have to do it soon because she was going too, she said, just like everyone else had. We have no power to stop this rushing off into other heavens, do we?

Later, I had to ask Anya, did she say anything else, did my mother tell you anything more? This was near Paris, in the small house we went to, a place I could not afford, a place I detested. The old wisdom says that when a child dies, the child dies having known everything, having received all knowledge. During those final months, someone said this to me. It was the case then that people very frequently pulled me aside into strange corners to tell me ghastly things like this. And it was also the case that I found myself asking ghastly things of my child.

For instance, this question, which I asked in the back garden, while bees hovered. They were bees that Anya understood somehow would not sting her but would only sting me. Part of this new wisdom was to understand the amount of suffering a mother had to endure. Did she say anything else, I asked again, and Anya looked to me and said, what was her name, and I said, my mother's name was Fania, and she said, this is a very pretty name Fania, and I said, I remember almost nothing about her but the name, and she said, this is something your mother told me, and I asked her to repeat this, and she said, your mother says you probably remember nothing, that she is a shadow to you.

The opposite of reason is not always the same as a lie: doctors had given Anya medicine, and the medicine was making her hallucinate, and the combination of the medicine and the hallucinations was making her talk about my dead mother. This is what Franz was always reminding me, that the drugs had powerful consequences, but I hated Franz very much then, and I did not care for the truth. Everyone after all was dying everywhere and I was not dying anywhere but there in the garden, in the city's heat. I dressed as if I were mourning months before I needed to, and I never stopped.

There are separate rooms, Anya said, when I pressed her to describe how it was she got to talk to my mother. 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.

The day before, Anya and I had played hide-and-seek, and when she could not find me, when she grew too tired to keep looking, I said, I am on one side of the wall, you are on the other side of the wall.

Move through the wall, Anya had said. Move through the wall, Mama.

And I told her: It doesn't work that way.

Close your eyes, she said, and move through the wall, Mama. Just try. It's not that hard. Fania does it all the time.

She goes, she goes, she goes.

The last trace of living I saw in her, we were holding her, passing her between us as if this was what she needed, what was prescribed to her by doctors, to be moved between her parents, shared in love, offered our silent benedictions, when in fact it was us who needed the holy intercession. A mirror of her birth, all of us in this room holding her. In the moments immediately after, we were visited by a profound quiet, an absence of all sound, and I am sure this was the noise of her passing over.

Are you in there, Franz asked her at some point, or have you gone already? We were young. It was late, and July. She had come as a surprise. We were students. Very much unprepared to become parents. After it was over-really over-he stood over her body. I do not believe it, he said. I refuse to believe any of this is possible.

All of this is embarrassing to admit. All this business of anticipating the dead, putting one's ear against a wall and expecting voices. I was always in the process of embarrassing myself, or revealing to myself some new territory of 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.

And what happened was this: my husband had gone missing. It had been days. Two days, three days; I had not slept, and it had become difficult to judge the time. He was a conductor of an orchestra here in London. Not one of the very famous ones, or even one of the very good ones, but one successful enough that he occasionally appeared on television looking appropriately bewildered, or in the pages of the various newspapers whose readers cared about the obsolete arts. He'd been at the concert hall the last I knew. It had been an ordinary evening. He'd left before supper, as always, already in his dress slacks. A car came to retrieve him. Near eight, I listened to him on the radio, which was something I used to like to do.

Our last moments together were rushed. I took him by the shoulders. We'd suffered an unsettling encounter recently and I thought he might want me to come with him, if only to try to forget about it all for a few hours. This encounter was all we'd talked about lately. But I am getting ahead of myself.

He didn't want me to come. You'll hate it, he said, meaning the concert, the music he was conducting, the graveyard air of the concert hall.

That last day, Franz seemed taller, I thought. He was always physically very lovely, even when he was young and stupid. You have been good to me, he said. Well, you are very easy to please, I told him, I can always tell when you are unhappy.

I thought I was telling the truth when I said this. I'd always believed I knew him better than I did.

He put his hands against my cheeks and kissed me and then he was gone.

When he did not return by his normal time that night, I figured it was because there was some official dinner or event I had forgotten about. It was autumn, the beginning of the season, and this was not uncommon. I'd long stopped paying close attention to the endless cycle of benefactors and begging that attended his job. When he was not there in the morning, I thought I must have slept through his arrival and his leaving, his coming and going.

By that afternoon, it was obvious something terrible had happened. His assistant, Jonathan, called to ask whether I had seen him. He had not come to work. The players were waiting. We think maybe he's confused his schedule, Jonathan said. Maybe he thinks we are meeting in Fulham, he told me, which was where the orchestra...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Dutton
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593475461
• ISBN 13: 9780593475461
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 464
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Dutton; https://www.penguin.com/dutton-childrens-overview/; ; Im Mittelfeld 25; K?ln; Deutschland; 51105; Deutschland