The Mercy Room: A Novel

by Gilles Rozier

In a country gripped by war and overrun by the enemy, a sexual obsession tests the limits of one person's capacity for good or evil.

In a small town in occupied France, a teacher of German is recruited by the Gestapo to translate sensitive documents. Every week, waiting for the next assignment, the teacher must sit for hours outside the commandant's office as prisoners are led past. Some are strangers; others are friends and neighbors known for a lifetime. It is often difficult to avoid eye contact, to keep from reacting, as men and women are taken to detention cells and then to the covered trucks that wait outside.

One day, a strikingly handsome Jewish soldier is among the prisoners, and a spark is ignited. In an unprecedented act of boldness, the teacher saves the doomed man from the Gestapo and hides him in a secret room in the cellar. Here begins a shattering affair in which two bodies and two antagonistic languages, Yiddish and German, are magnetically attracted.

In a tour de force of storytelling, Gilles Rozier identifies the narrator of this gripping novel neither by name nor gender. As the lovers become swept up in their passion, letting all thoughts of identity and transgression drop away, we are never quite sure how many layers of risk the teacher is taking on in harboring this precious fugitive.

But is this a love that can withstand threats of wartime, or simply a transaction between a prisoner and his captor? Is the schoolteacher a hero or an opportunist? A collaborator or a resister? And finally: a man or a woman? Sparely told and achingly beautiful, The Mercy Room is an exquisite and subtle novel about the power of desire, the beauty of language, and the fine line between the best and worst of which we are capable.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, War, Holocaust, Novels, French Literature, Historical

156 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Gilles Rozier was born in 1963 in La Tronche. He graduated from a top notch school of management in 1984. He started learning Yiddish in 1985 and had his Thesis Defense in Yiddish Literature with mentor Rachel Ertel. He has been acting as General Manager of Bibliothèque Medem in Paris since 1994. He is married and has two sons. Both French and Yiddish are spoken at home. He wrote a few poems in Yiddish which were published by literary magazines Di pen (Oxford), Yerusholaimer almanakh (Jerusalem) and Toplpunkt (Tel-Aviv). Gilles Rozier also writes novels in French.

Reviews

[Daphna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed about two thirds of the novel, but found that the last part spiraled into an intellectual agenda that was detrimental to the rhythm and vector of the narrative. For me it spoiled what had started off as an interesting and thought provoking read.
The story, told in the first person, is of a German-language teacher in Nazi occupied France who almost inadvertently saves a Jewish man from the Gestapo and ultimate deportation and death.
The protagonist is clearly a sociopath whose only apparent need and connection in life is to literature, specifically German literature. He has no empathy for the plight of others, not for those nearest him, nor for those surrounding him. He has no clear political stance as regards the occupation, working for the Germans because he does not have the courage to resist them, but not too bothered by his collaboration except as it impacts his regular routine. He has no interest in what is happening around him, and, in effect, no need for meaningful human interaction.
And then the rescued Herman enters his life, and a human connection is made for the first time in his life.
The story is gripping and interesting right up to the part in which he also "rescues" a Yiddish translation of Heine, as a brave and selfless gesture toward Herman. It then somehow spirals into the issue of Yiddish language and literature, its origins, its relationship to German culture, inserting lengthy quotations of juxtaposed German and Yiddish prose. The story loses focus, certainly for those of us who know neither German nor Yiddish, as if the author had some sort of cultural agenda and artificially interjected it into the story. Despite the satisfying return to the narrative in the last few pages, it really spoiled my reading experience and put a damper on my initial enthusiasm.

[Brendan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Note: It says in the dust jacket blurb that the gender of the narrator is not revealed, but I thought it was quite clear she's a woman.

Anyway, high marks for a strong narrative voice, ease of readability, and sharp focus. Low marks for lack of sexual passion in a book that is supposedly about sexual passion and brevity. It's probably closer to a 4 than a 3. But my general feeling is that it could have been better; not that I really like it.

[Brady Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

A lot of confusing and rambling narration kept me from fully embracing the complex story of a sexually frustrated French man (I don’t care what you say, the main character is a man) in Nazi-occupied France. There is so much contradictory inner dialogue that it’s difficult to parse the character’s true intentions, and instead of adding some kind of literary layers, it just bumbles along to its conclusion.

[R Fontaine · Rating 2 out of 5]

While the setting and time is the German occupation of France,the overriding,sometimes overwhelming, focus is on the suppressed sexuality of the protagonist.
When,on impulse, he rescues a young Jewish man from the grips of the Gestapo, his suppression, ends in the cellar (the Mercy Room) of his home.
A brief novel, yet not a very informative nor enjoyable read.

[Barbara Langlois · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn’t have a very high opinion of the story. Although the narrator was supposedly in love, or in lust, with Herman, he repeatedly referred to him as “my Jew“ or “the Jew in the cellar.” Very condescending, very racist.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

I mean...if you're looking for uplifting...this may not be the book for you. The writing was beautiful. A few weird moments in the translation. But otherwise well done.

[Anne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not great with books with unknown or vague narrators - I know, perhaps, that they let the reader's imagination work a little harder, or they stretch one's perceptions and assumptions. But, I think I just need a more concrete story sometimes. I do, however, tend to like books that take place around World War II, as this one does. The basic story is that the narrator is a German teacher living in occupied France during the war. The Nazis recuit this person(whose gender is never identified)to translate documents for them. As the person watches as known acquaintances are marched to their certain death, s/he makes the dangerous decision to hide a Jewish soldier in her home. An illicit love-affair ensues. While the teacher is quite the intellectual, often losing her/himself in the beauty of great literature, s/he is not, as one would expect, very reflective when it comes to the circumstances of her life and those around her. In many ways I found the narrator too dismissive of surrounding horrors - but perhaps this was a survivial mechanism. The gender ambiguity also lends an interesting angle to this novel, which can be read in vastly different ways depending on if the narrator is seen as a woman or a man. I did feel more compelled to see the narrator as a woman given a description of his/her first marriage early in the book, but perhaps this is just a result of sterotypes in my head. Whatever the case, this is an interesting and different little read - not a bad way to pass the afternoon.

[G · Rating 3 out of 5]

Strange. Uncomfortable. I read the narrator as male, but either way he/she is incredibly unlikable. Enthralled with his/her captive audience without actually liking anything about said captive except his body and tastes in poetry. Would have loved a longer book that went more into Herman - he went along so easily for most of the book, but he must have picked up on the Weird and been faced with the dilemma of potentially putting off his savior.

Herman's death was cheesy, though, and very predictable: this is a Holocaust novel told by an obsessive and selfish unreliable narrator, so of course the object of obsession has to die at the very last moment. Would have been more interesting if he'd survived and gone off without a word to reclaim his freedom, while the narrator stews and frets the rest of his life.

Can't complain about the SS man being brained like a cow at a slaughterhouse, though, as much as his killer seemed to flip out of nowhere. The narrator's obsession with 'his' sister's sex life is one of those things that made me picture 'him' as the sort of offended, sexist male who cares more about how the women in his family reflect on him than he does about the actual women. But, hey, there's never a bad reason to brain an SS man.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good and interesting read. I picked it up from the pile of freebies in the break room at Borders in Columbus Circle. I read 1) because it hadn't come out yet and that made me feel cool, and 2) because the author purposely wrote the book so that you couldn't tell the gender of the narrator. In the book, the narrator hides a Jewish soldier in the basement (along with several forbidden books and other things outlawed because of the war) and subsequently has an affair with him. Hiding a Jew during WWII was dangerous business enough, but adding the extra level of possible homosexuality made the book all the more intriguing.

The narrator was a gloomy, cynical person throughout the book, which I got a little tired of, but I enjoyed the book overall. And I definitely imagined the narrator as a man :)

[Alicia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was an interesting and disturbing novel about WWII. Set in France, a German language teacher feels ineffectual in aiding the resistance and spends time thinking about, but not becoming, heroic. Eventually, the teacher takes in a young Jewish man, who is hidden away in the cellar, even as the narrators sister is having an affair with a Nazi soldier upstairs. Eventually the narrator and the Jewish man engage in a passionate affair. To make this more interesting the gender of the narrator is never revealed. This is one of those novels that explores subjects not often visited in Holocaust or WWII novels and does make you think. I am not sure this was an entirely successful effort but did do an excellent job of exploring the psyche of a (at least outwardly) cold and unfeeling individual.

[Big H · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author did a wonderful job making the main character gender-less, making you wonder how deep the MC's "sin" of loving a male Jew, hidden from the SS, goes. There were a couple of things that bothered me about this novel, though: the predictability (SPOILER: everyone dies), sometimes you couldn't tell what was "real life" and what the MC was just mentally playing out, and how many times the MC casually mentions how much of a whore-who-got-raped the MC's sister was (seriously: the casual mention of how much of an SS whore she was and how she was raped after the war for being so was approximately half of the book).

[Christine Donoghue · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm torn between 3 and 4 stars on this. I liked the setting, although that might sound strange. WW2 Germany was not a pleasant place, I'm sure, but I don't think that I ever read a story where you learned about what it was like for the average villagers in Germany. This story spoke of how they coped, day-to-day, and the fear of the Gestapo, and the rationing, etc. I was frustrated at the end, because I really thought I would be able to tell, whether it was a story narrated by a man or by a woman, but the author was very creative in keeping that a mystery. The idea of the story was very well executed--I felt very claustrophobic at times!

[Z Bloom · Rating 1 out of 5]

в самата концепция има известен потенциал, поне на пръв поглед, но в крайна сметка всичко в историята служи иденствено на амбивалентността на образа -- трик, който спъва историята по-често отколкото я прави интересна. единственото, което ме грабна, бяха интересните секс сцени, в които образите като че достигаха някаква пълнота, детайлност и истинност, която липсваше в останалите моменти. но пък тази книга отново ме тласна към томас ман..

[Ian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Novel of illicit love set in occupied France during WWII. Strains to be tittilating and risque but in fact it hardly maintains the reader's interest. The problem here is that we know so little about the characters that it's all but impossible to care about them. Treated differently, this tragic tale of obsession could have been much more compelling.

[Lavonne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wow. I was a bit distracted while reading by trying to determine the gender of the narrator, but actually appreciated the neutrality as I went on. What a story. Read this book in one sitting. Haunting, passionate, hidden, mercy, love, pain, survival, desperation...... all explored in 138 pages.

[Lorri · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting read that takes place in WWII occupied France. The main character, a German translator, hides a Jewish soldier in his/her home unbeknownst to anyone. They end up having an affair, but throughout the book, you never learn the name or gender of the main character.

[Debs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very strange love story taking place in Germany during the holocaust; the protagonists gender is never disclosed. Protagonist also wholly unsympathetic.

[Lise · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book about forbidden love during WWII.