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Overview
Set in the 1960s, The Dream Room is the story of a family's dissolution, as witnessed through the eyes of twelve-year-old David. An only child, he is fascinated by the culinary arts -- making the family's dinner nightly and reading cookbooks as if they were novels and novels as if they were cookbooks -- content to simply spend time with his mother and father, a pilot during World War II who is now an unemployed engineer. One long, rainy summer, they work together building model airplanes for the toy shop beneath their apartment to support themselves -- their only means of survival. But although times are difficult, David is happy, for his family has never been so close and life has never felt so secure. But his peace is shattered by an old family friend, whose appearance will destroy everything David holds most dear and irrevocably alter the course of his life.
Intelligent and philosophical, The Dream Room is at once an entrancing family history, love story, and fairy tale that confirms Marcel Möring's reputation as one of the great literary talents of his generation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780062008633 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 12/15/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 134 |
| File size: | 388 KB |
About the Author
Marcel Möring is the bestselling author of Mendel, The Great Longing, In Babylon, and The Dream Room. Widely considered the Netherlands' leading contemporary writer, he lives in Rotterdam with his wife and children.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
When, in a sudden surge of pride, he gave up his old job without actually having a new one, my father decided to build model airplanes. The Doll Hospital, which was just downstairs, was constantly visited by boys who came for a plastic Messerschmidt kit or Spitfire Mark V, but as soon as they saw the ready-made models that were hanging from the ceiling most of them wanted one of those instead. I had been there when a couple of boys once asked if they could buy one of those finished models.
"They're not for sale," said the doll doctor. "They're here to show what it looks like. it's a kit. You're supposed to build them yourself."
He began talking louder when he spoke to these boys, like an English tourist in France who thinks that it's only a matter of speaking more slowly and loudly to make yourself understood.
"But I don't want to build them myself," the boys replied.
"What do you think?" roared the doll doctor. "You think I've got nothing better to do than spend the whole day building airplanes for you? Bugger off!"
He was a man of little patience.
Once a month, when he came up to collect the rent, the doll doctor would complain to my father. They'd sit in the old wicker chairs on the balcony that ran all along the back of the house, and drink beer. It was always evening when the doll doctor came.
"In my day we did everything ourselves. My father even made me my first bicycle, out of the parts from three old bikes. Nowadays those brats can't do a damn thing."
"God... How right you are." The doll doctor drank his beer and let out a deep moan.
"If you sold them ready-made," I said, "you could ask more money for them." I was leaning against the railing, looking out at the windows on the other side of the park behind our house. Sometimes, when my father and I were sitting on the balcony, we played a game: we tried to guess what they were doing and saying, in their little lamplit cubicles across the park. Usually it ended in some sort of radio play. "I told you not to dry your socks in the oven!" I'd shriek, and my father would slowly reply that drying socks in the oven was a better idea than making ice in a hot-water bottle (which I had tried once).
"I don't have time to build airplanes," said the doll doctor. "And I don't feel like it, either."
"I would let somebody else do it," I said, "and I'd give him a few guilders per box and add that to the price of the kit, plus a bit extra. Nobody sells ready-made model planes. I think the customer is perfectly happy to pay more for something like that."
"And who is supposed to build them for me?" asked the doll doctor. He sounded pensive.
I turned around. My father shook his head with a barely perceptible "no." The doll doctor followed my gaze.
"Boris! Damn! You're an aviator. If you... I'll give you a guilder a box."
My father sank back in his chair, groaning. I picked up my empty glass from the table and went inside.
"Why a guilder?" I heard my father say. "And what does my being a pilot have to do with it?"
"You can have fifty cents if you think a guilder is overpaid," said the doll doctor.
"If you want another beer...?"
"Okay, one guilder fifty," said the doll doctor. "That's as high as I go. I have my margin to think of."
My father picked up the empty bottles and headed for the kitchen. "His margin," he said, as he passed me. I was sitting on a stool behind the bar, reading a cookbook. "He who will get rich because of him will never be poor again."
"I heard that!"
"You were supposed to," said my father. He ducked into the steaming mouth of the refrigerator. When he reappeared, he looked at me for a long time. I pushed my glass toward him. He straightened his back and walked past me. "I'm not talking to you, sir," he said. "You tricked me into this." The doll doctor laughed. I picked up my glass and went to the fridge. "That's the last one," said my father. "In my day, a boy of your age would have been in bed hours ago."
"Everything was better in the old days," drawled the doll doctor.
"Now he's telling me," said my father.
When I came home from school the next day, the landing was packed with boxes with pictures of airplanes that rose up, grinning wickedly, out of grayish clouds of smoke, fire belching from their wings. The piles of cardboard were nearly up to my chin and formed a colorful wall of cardboard that ran from one end of the hallway to the other. On one of the piles stood a glass globe filled with water in which a tiny airplane was perched on a stand. There was a note from the doll doctor taped to the glass. My name was written on it. I took the globe in my hand. It began, hesitantly, to snow.
"For a man who sells children's toys, he really doesn't have a clue when to stop," said my father, when, half an hour later, he walked out onto the landing and found me there, amid the drifting piles of boxes. I still had my coat on and was sitting on the floor, the snow globe in my hand, dreaming about Hawker Hurricanes, Lancaster Bombers, and Focke Wulfs. "The boxes alone are good enough for you, aren't they?" He kneeled down beside me and...
The Dream Room. Copyright © by Marcel Moring. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.Reading Group Guide
Introduction
Marcel Möring mines World War II's political aftershocks and its oftentimes subtle, confusing entrées into the intimate worlds of individuals. A mesmerizing story of betrayal, loss, and coming-of-age in 1960s Europe, The Dream Room is the story of a family's dissolution as witnessed through the eyes of 13-year-old David. An only child, David enjoys spending time with his mother and father, a World War II pilot who is now an unemployed engineer. During one long, rainy summer they work together building model airplanes for a toy shop. Though times are difficult, David is happy, for his family has never been so close and life has never felt so secure. But that joy is shattered by an old family friend whose appearance will destroy everything David holds dear. And it is not until years later that David will finally come to terms with the events that irrevocably altered his life. Discussion Questions- David tells us: "Different people will give different periods in their lives as a clear point in time, the moment when life itself suddenly seems simple and obvious...It's the kind of memory, a memory that plays up more strongly than all the rest, a recollection tinged with melancholy and regret that makes one yearn for those days of freedom, the seeming wealth of possibilities, the first nudge in the back that later becomes the rhythm of life itself, grown-up life." For David, this moment came when his mother crossed her leg over his father's -- a simple moment of sexuality. What does David know from this moment about his parents? About love? About sex? How does it change?
- His mother says, "Everything mustcome to an end," when she applies to become a stewardess. She is determined to fly as her husband, a former pilot, can no longer fly, and in fact, the best he can do is build toy airplanes. Why do these characters react with sadness rather than anger to damaging, hurtful actions? Is it part of the European character? Is it part of post-war life in Europe? How is it different from the way Americans react?
- David's father tells him of a man he met just after the war, Mr. Morris, and his mission to find out about the Germany's "concentrating" his sons and other Jews until only their souls are left. "I'm still looking for something as powerful as Mr. Morris's need to find out everything he could about concentration...Something real. One has to do something real," David's father tells him. What does David's father mean by something real? David wonders if his desire to cook is real. He hopes so, but we find out that he becomes a doll doctor, the same as their grumpy landlord at the beginning of the story. Does David ultimately find something real? Or has he been "concentrated" by his mother's imperious nature?
- David's father and mother were "the pilot who fell from the sky, the nurse who fell to the floor." How do we know that their relationship changes by the time David is a young boy? How does his parents' love affair ("My mother was no Florence Nightingale, he, no Icarus") contribute to David's ultimate loss of innocence?
- What role does food and cooking play in this story? Is it symbolic of a dream that David gives up? Is there another, even more personal dream David gives up? Why is this book called The Dream Room? Is the doll hospital The Dream Room? Or is The Dream Room something less literal, a state of mind or memory? Does David live in a dream room? Did his father? Is a dream room a good thing? What does David's ability to answer "enigmatic questions, but not obvious ones" tell us about him? What enigmatic question, or questions, is The Dream Room an answer to?
- Humbert Coe, with his "indulgent smile of a fat man" gives David a chance to express his true self--his savant-like cooking talent--when he takes him to a restaurant and David teaches the chef to cook properly. What is David's relationship to Coe at that moment? How does it change?
- In ways that David's father is incapable, Humbert Coe assumes a paternal figure in David's life, encouraging, even validating, his passion for cooking. How does the Oedipal urge emerge and ultimately define David's life when he learns of his mother and Coe's sexual indiscretions? Does it have more power because David is 13 years old, on the verge of sexual maturity, when he finds out? Is his mother's affair the reason he does not become a chef?
- Does David's mother's sexual indiscretion with Humbert Coe affect David? If so, in what ways? Does David become his father? Are people destined to come full circle, return to their beginnings, at least in certain ways, in their lives?
- We are never overtly told by David that his mother had an affair with Coe, but we know. What do you think happens directly after he and his father come in from the rain and find Humbert Coe and his mother? What emotional events occur without us being told?
- Why does the The Dream Room suddenly jump to David's story about the sculptor and the king, and David's relationship with the neighborhood children and his wife? How does that feel when you are reading it? Are you surprised to find out David has become a doll doctor, then kite builder? Are you surprised that he has a wife?
- David tells the children a fairy tale about an imprisoned sculptor, his 13-year-old son and an obsessed king. The king, who will kill the sculptor after he has obtained what he wants, asks the sculptor to sculpt the most beautiful woman in the world so he can bring her to life and marry her. The sculptor unconsciously replicates his own mother, who ultimately saves him from the king. How is the sculptor similar to David's father? How is he not? Is the king similar to any of the people from David's past? Is this story a fantasy of David's childhood?
- How has David's country changed since he was a child? Since his parents met? Is David happier in the post-war world of present-day than of his childhood?
- David's homeland now has numerous émigrés living in it -- Morroccan, Somalian, Turkish. Has his passion for cooking been transferred to an enjoyment of the very different people in his life? Or is there no connection?
- The Dream Room begins with David's idea to build model airplanes and sell them. It ends with him telling his wife Nur, "It was a plan that would save us." Did David's plan save his family?