Our February Author: Herta Müller

This month we took on Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller's novel, The Land of Green Plums.  A good place to start learning more about this author is her eloquent Nobel lecture, which is packed with autobiographical detail that parallels the experiences of the narrator in the book as well as insights into her use of language and image that are key to appreciating her work.

In this article from Sign and Sight, Müller details her experiences with the Romanian Securitate. (The Guardian reports on the backlash: Herta Müller 'has a psychosis', claims Romanian agent who spied on her.) In an interview with Radio Free Europe offers additional biographical detail including this, not irrelevant to the book at hand,

My mother was deported to the USSR. She spent five years in a labor camp, paying for the "collective guilt" of Hitler's deeds. They called that internment "Aufbauarbeit," "reconstruction work". My grandfather never got used to those changes. He was a poor man now. He couldn't go to the barber's three times a week to get shaved, like he used to. And that was no small thing, mind you. That was his social life. He used to go there to meet the community, his peers. It was a ritual which he was forced to give up. What happened to him was socially degrading. And my grandfather, and that whole generation of grandfathers turned outcasts by the new regime, have never ever accepted socialism. Then my mother returned from the USSR in 1950, after five years in the labor camp, after she'd witnessed death and famine...

Although I could find no other interviews with the author in English, there are plenty of critics weighing in on her importance as a writer.  A good place to start is with fellow Romanian Norman Manea in the New York Review of Books: summary or podcast.  Lyn Marven's assessment on OpenDemocracy offers many good insights, including this one the book's title,

The translated titles lose Müller's invented compound-nouns, and refuse the oddness of the long phrases. Their effect in English is apparently too, well, alien. But Müller's linguistically inventive work already challenges German readers. Her poetic language also draws on Romanian: Herztier is a German "translation" of a Romanian wordplay with inima (heart) and animal (beast)

For more observations on Müller's use of language, see this review at Dialog International.

For a visual break from exploring Herta Müller's prose, sample these heart-wrenching photos from the AIDS epidemic among Romanian children by Kent Klich from his book Children Of Ceausescu. Müller wrote the accompanying text.

Finally, just for a glimpse of Müller in person, here is a clip (with subtitles) of her speaking passionately about the plight of the individual in the face of dictatorship at the Prague Writer's Festival:

For February: The Land of Green Plums by Herta Müller

For February we have selected The Land of Green Plums by 2009 Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller.

Like the narrator of her novel The Land of Green Plums, Herta Muller grew up a German minority in Ceausescu's Romania, which she eventually left to settle in Germany. Her own experience lends credibility to the voice of her young narrator, who inhabits a deprived police state in which minorities such as the ethnic Germans suffer persecution beyond the quotidian oppressions of Ceausescu's regime. The title refers to the young woman's observations of the swaggering policemen who wolf down plums from the city trees, even while they're still green; the act serves as a symbol of greed, arbitrary power, and stupidity. Although an element of the story is survival, achieved by clinging to the German culture and language, the novel also confronts the older characters' sympathy with the Nazis. Nevertheless, Muller's fictional heroine finds salvation, as she herself did, in modern Germany.

For additional information about this book and author see this post.