Book Review: ‘Rooms for Vanishing,’ by Stuart Nadler

Nadler then introduces us to Sonja’s mother, Fania, who immigrated to Montreal after the war and works as a masseuse. “If I press just slightly in the right spot,” she muses, she can “put a patient in mind of the past, of a room, for instance, that has been exploded, or incinerated by bombs, or raided by soldiers.” Rooms, walls and partitions of all kinds loom large in this novel. Fania, whose infant son Moses was murdered by Nazis, still hears him crying “from just beyond the wall of my apartment … but I can’t move through walls to get to him.”

The third timeline features an adult version of Moses, who is haunted by the ghost of a friend. Curiously, Nadler spends so much time detailing the bureaucracy of ghost life that any sense of mystery is squashed. And the final timeline — focused on Arnold, a centenarian, and his letter exchanges with his rediscovered daughter, Sonja — raises too many questions about the permeability of the timelines to be fully affecting.

Nadler writes in a register of formal mysticism that can be pleasantly sorrowful at times, overwrought at others. His characters often speak in wispy homily, making proclamations like “A secret always needs a strange ear, or else the secret loses its power and it dies” or “When one is waiting desperately for someone to appear to them from a crowd … what one is really waiting for is to jump from one skin to another.” A few of these might be acceptable, but nearly every character in “Rooms for Vanishing” speaks this way. Even a skilled writer like Nadler can’t always make fresh the tediousness of longing, or liberate the Altermans from reading as players in a post-Holocaust parable.

Still, there are moments of deep emotion in this ambitious novel. Fania’s chapters are moving, and listening to her pelt Hermann, her language-immersion partner, with Yiddishkeit zingers is a welcome relief from the book’s inconsistent world-building and gloom.

Even 80 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, many Holocaust survivors are still living with the hope of becoming whole again, which may well be Nadler’s point. There are no happy endings — only infinite variations of sorrow.