Book Summary and Reviews of Rooms for Vanishing by Stuart Nadler

Book Summary

A prismatic, mind-bending family epic about the splintering of a Jewish family from Vienna—exploring the weight of exile and how grief twists our sense of the impossible.

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 warhas 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 doppelganger in the basement of a Montreal hotel; Moses, the son, is followed by the ghost of his best friend and eventually returns to Prague to make peace with the dead; 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 Sonja. Through their stories, we come to see how—amid profound loss and the madness of grief—ghosts are made momentarily real.

Spellbinding and profound, Rooms for Vanishing explores the boundary between desire and reality; this is a singular work that masterfully considers the possibility of magic, and the dangerous and impossible hope for a different history.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

1. "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." (p. 8). Discuss what Anya means by this. How does she speak to her grandmother? How does Sonja respond to her daughter in this moment, and then how does she metabolize this information over time? How does this logic of separate rooms inform the rest of the novel?
2. Sonja, Fania, Moses, and Arnold are all haunted by the loss of their loved ones and re-formed by their grief. Discuss if and how their grief ever opens up a sense of possibility or connection. Does their grief...