The Land Of Green Plums

Mueller takes an unflinching look at the alienation and complexity of a rapidly changing Eastern Europe, focusing on a group of young friends in Ceaucescu's Romania.

From the winner of the IMPAC Award and the Nobel Prize, a fierce novel about a young Romanian woman's discovery of betrayal in the most intimate reaches of her life "I've been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp." Thus begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceaucescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before; this time, she believes, will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. "Marry me," the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country. As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot trying to flee to Hungary, to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them, to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers, and to Paul, her lover, her one source of trust, despite his constant drunkenness. In her distraction, she misses her stop to find herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the appointment pale by comparison. Herta Müller pitilessly renders the humiliating terrors of a crushing regime. Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment confirms her standing as one of Europe's greatest writers.

The protagonist of Herta Muller's Traveling on One Leg is Irene, a fragile woman born to a German family in Romania, who has recently emigrated from Romania to Germany. The novel focuses on Irene's relationship with three men: Franz, whom she met in Romania and who was unwilling to respond to her love for him; Stefan, a friend of Franz's; and Thomas, a bisexual bookseller in perpetual crisis. Despite being born to a German family, Irene's place in Germany is as a recent emigre and an unassimilated Romanian German. She feels neither longing for Romania nor any comfort in her newly adopted Germany. Politically and socially isolated, Irene moves within the emotional orbit of these three men, while at the same time moving between West Berlin, Marburg, and Frankfurt, taking a dissonant journey within strange yet familiar territory. Characterized by the same sense of profound isolation found in Muller's The Land of Green Plums (see page 20), Traveling on One Leg is a poignant exploration of exile, homeland, and identity.

“[Lessing] is a pro, writing at the top of her powers, realistically, passionately, accessibly…. a stirring novel”—San Francisco Chronicle Frances Lennox stands at her stove, bringing another feast to readiness before ladling it out to the youthful crew assembled around her hospitable table—her two sons and their friends, girlfriends, ex-friends and new friends fresh off the street. It’s London in the 1960s and everything is being challenged and changed. But what is being tolerated? Comrade Johnny delivers political tirades, then laps up the adolescent adulation before disappearing into the night to evade the clutches of his responsibilities. Johnny’s mother funds all but finds she can embrace only one lost little girl—Sylvia, who leaves for a South African village dying of AIDS. These are the people dreaming the Sixties into being and who, on the morning after, woke to find they were the ones taxed with cleaning up and making good.

"This piece is part of a series of attempts to make sense of a place, of a culture, of a system. How can something so small as a passport be so defining of someone’s life experience? Is the commodification of nature still a symptom of a colonialist process? Using the format of a passport, I collected stickers from fruits and vegetables that I consumed in my first months in the US; I had recently gone through the process of having to apply for a visa. The stamp I got in my passport is the reason I can be here now. Eating and sleeping in a different land than the one where I was born and grew up in. Eating the fruits grown in a land much more like my own. We both -- me and the fruits -- traveled and crossed borders. I designed pages with mountains and palm trees, reflecting the landscape I now see every day. I bound these pages together. On the [first page], one sentence from Frantz Fanon is split in two: “the settler’s town is a well-fed town / its belly is always full of good things.”"--from publisher

A masterful new novel from the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize, hailed for depicting the "landscape of the dispossessed" with "the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose" (Nobel Prize Committee) It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless calculus of hunger that governed the labor colony: one shovel load of coal is worth one gram of bread. In her new novel, Nobel laureate Herta Müller calls upon her unique combination of poetic intensity and dispassionate precision to conjure the distorted world of the labor camp in all its physical and moral absurdity. She has given Leo the language to express the inexpressible, as hunger sharpens his senses into an acuity that is both hallucinatory and profound. In scene after disorienting scene, the most ordinary objects accrue tender poignancy as they acquire new purpose—a gramophone box serves as a suitcase, a handkerchief becomes a talisman, an enormous piece of casing pipe functions as a lovers' trysting place. The heart is reduced to a pump, the breath mechanized to the rhythm of a swinging shovel, and coal, sand, and snow have a will of their own. Hunger becomes an insatiable angel who haunts the camp, but also a bare-knuckled sparring partner, delivering blows that keep Leo feeling the rawest connection to life. Müller has distilled Leo's struggle into words of breathtaking intensity that take us on a journey far beyond the Gulag and into the depths of one man's soul.

In Romania at the height of Ceausescu's reign, several young people leave the impoverished provinces for the city in search of better prospects, but they must face betrayal, suicide, and the reality that even the strongest must bend to the oppressors or r