Synopsis
A brilliant exploration of sexual obsession and human frailty in a country gripped by war. In a small town in occupied France during World War II, a teacher of German is recruited by the Gestapo to translate sensitive documents. Every week, waiting for the next assignment, our narrator sits outside the commandant's office and watches prisoners being led to detention cells before being deported. Always existing on the fringes of life, caring only for books, the teacher has never done anything heroic. And certainly this is no time to get entangled in other people's problems. But one day a stunning Jewish soldier is among the prisoners. His name is Herman and the teacher recognizes him from their lives before the war. In an unprecedented act of boldness, the teacher sneaks Herman out of headquarters, brings him home, and hides him in the cellar, along with a cache of banned books. So begins an extraordinary and shattering affair in which two people and two antagonistic languages, Yiddish and German, are magnetically attracted. In a tour de force of novelistic technique, Gilles Rozier never reveals the gender of his narrator--opening the question of how many levels of transgression and risk the teacher is taking by hiding Herman. THE MERCY ROOM is an exquisite novel about the power of desire and the competing forces of good or ill in the heart of each of us.
Reviews
Thought provoking but ultimately disappointing, this novel by the director of the Center for Yiddish Culture in Paris attempts to probe the psyche of a Vichy collaborator who falls in love with a Jew and hides him in the family cellar. In a small French hometown, the narrator, who remains nameless—and whose gender also remains unspecified throughout, though some hints are dropped—teaches German at the local girls' grammar school and also translates documents for the Gestapo. Cold and unfeeling, the narrator can only summon up passion for German language and literature, particularly for forbidden works by Jewish authors like Mann and Heine. As the war rages on, the narrator drives his or her neglected spouse to commit suicide; obsesses about a sister's boisterous sex life with her Nazi boyfriend; and sneaks a Jew, Herman, out of Gestapo headquarters and into the narrator's cellar, where the two become lovers. When they aren't having sex, they're discussing literature: Herman learns German and the narrator becomes expert in Yiddish. In probing the thin line between heroism and collaboration, Rozier draws coy parallels between the otherness of homosexuals and that of Jews in Nazi Germany. While that may seem daring, or titillating, in Europe, it's unlikely to win fans here. (Mar. 21)
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*Starred Review* This haunting and, at times, harrowing novel, set in France during the German occupation of the 1940s, is a variation of the Anne Frank story. The narrator lives in a small town, in the family house, where the mother and sister also live; the father is a prisoner of war in Germany. The narrator teaches German at the local school and regards the literature in that language to be the supreme passion of life. That is, until one day when the narrator, awaiting a translation assignment from the local gestapo agency, lays eyes on an attractive young man--Jewish--who obviously is being taken off. The narrator whisks the young man away and stashes him in the wine cellar of the family home. There the young man lives, hidden away, for more than two years--during which the narrator and he fall in love and have a torrid sexual relationship. But as the end of the war approaches, the young man loses patience with his captivity, and an escape is planned, but things don't go as he and the narrator had outlined. Adding allure to the drama is that the gender of the narrator is never revealed; is this a heterosexual or homosexual affair? We never need to know, for this gripping story transcends such specifics. Brad Hooper
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