Trigger warning for suicidal ideation.
Who hasn’t wondered about what’s happening on the other side of the window in other people’s houses? Briefly glimpsed neighbors’ attitudes, manners, clothes, or expressions can give us hints but, unless we screw up the courage to make their acquaintance, we will always wonder about what happens inside those other houses. The unnamed protagonist of Norah Lange’s brief, disturbing novella, People in the Room (ably translated by Charlotte Whittle), becomes obsessed with the three women she sees through a window across the street. The impulse to wonder is perfectly natural, but the protagonist takes her wonderings to extremes. And yet, she is so unreliable that it’s hard to say whether anything actually happens at all. This is definitely a book to put one on one’s toes.
It all starts on an ordinary day sometime during the World Wars in Buenos Aires, when our protagonist happens to look up from her book to see three women—sisters—in a drawing room across the street. The women are mysterious. They don’t speak. They just sit and smoke and sip at wine or tea. Our protagonist begins to imagine who they are and how they came to be in that room. She might have gone on wondering forever if she hadn’t intercepted the reply to a telegram they sent and thus wrangled an excuse to introduce herself. In spite of all her hinting and questioning after that, our protagonist never seems to learn much more about the three sisters. And then, one day while our protagonist is away on a holiday suggested by her slightly worried family, they disappear.
People in the Room will be frustrating to a lot of readers. It was certainly frustrating to me. The brief description of it I had read made me think that I was getting something in the vein of Rear Window, though without the murder plot. It was clearly almost immediately that this was not that kind of book, even though it had a very claustrophobic and sinister atmosphere. Instead, the forward by César Aira was much more helpful for understanding this book. People in the Room predates Rear Window by a couple of decades, putting in the later part of the modernist period. The book stays with the unnamed narrator’s off-kilter thoughts for the entirety. Aira also notes that Lange was an inspiration for Jorge Luis Borges, a wonderfully experimental writer who often wrote about possibilities that don’t quite play out in reality. Readers who like thinking about “what if?” and are okay with books in which nothing much actually happens, where the action is all in a character’s head, might enjoy this challenging novella.