[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with
an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as
relevant. I welcome questions, comments,
or concerns about the material contained in this video.]
Herta Muller was born in the German-speaking region of Banat in central Romania, and grew up under Ceausescu. It was only in 1987 at the age of 34 that she and her husband were able to settle in West Berlin. This novel is difficult to appreciate apart from Muller’s personal experience of living under an authoritarian dictatorship, and having German as a first language but being forced to learn Romanian in primary school.
Herta Muller’s third novel tells the story of a group of young university students living in Ceausescu’s Romania. One of the young women, Lola, has violent sexual encounters with men in semi-public places, and we are left to guess why. (To keep party officials satisfied? For food? Pure sublimation?) She ends up dead one day – found hanging in her closet – under circumstances every bit as mysterious. Everyone’s lives are full of paranoia, angst, and fear of being turned into the state officials, who filter into and out of the characters’ lives in both latent and manifest forms. Unlike her friend who committed suicide (or was she killed?), the narrator of the novel decides to emigrate to Germany to face an uncertain future.
I must admit that I had a very difficult time with this novel, but not in the normal ways: it wasn’t difficult to read, or difficult to understand in historical context. It simply offered nothing new for me. The story, the tale of the lives of a young woman and a few of her male friends seemed, with all of its verisimilitude, straight out of history. Anyone that has read about Romania under Ceausescu knows about his cult of personality, the utter deprivation that his people constantly lived under, and surviving only to think possibly of one day being “disappeared.” The lives of Lola, Edgar, Georg, and Kurt are not unfamiliar to history.
The lessons this book teaches are the lessons of history, not of literature. I have a small amount of familiarity, gained solely through reading, about that time and place. In those books, I read of people like the major characters presented in the book. But at least for me, Muller’s novel presents no added value to the history I already know. Great fiction has to be more than “litterature verite.” It needs to bring something to the table that history cannot, something that speaks to the human condition differently than a historian does. Muller’s writing lacked this, at least for me.
Michael Hofmann’s translation is poetic, meditative, disjointed, which I found appropriate for the tone and subject matter of Muller’s novel. I look forward to reading more of Muller’s work in the future, and hope to appreciate it more than I did “The Land of Green Plums.”
Herta Muller’s third novel tells the story of a group of young university students living in Ceausescu’s Romania. One of the young women, Lola, has violent sexual encounters with men in semi-public places, and we are left to guess why. (To keep party officials satisfied? For food? Pure sublimation?) She ends up dead one day – found hanging in her closet – under circumstances every bit as mysterious. Everyone’s lives are full of paranoia, angst, and fear of being turned into the state officials, who filter into and out of the characters’ lives in both latent and manifest forms. Unlike her friend who committed suicide (or was she killed?), the narrator of the novel decides to emigrate to Germany to face an uncertain future.
I must admit that I had a very difficult time with this novel, but not in the normal ways: it wasn’t difficult to read, or difficult to understand in historical context. It simply offered nothing new for me. The story, the tale of the lives of a young woman and a few of her male friends seemed, with all of its verisimilitude, straight out of history. Anyone that has read about Romania under Ceausescu knows about his cult of personality, the utter deprivation that his people constantly lived under, and surviving only to think possibly of one day being “disappeared.” The lives of Lola, Edgar, Georg, and Kurt are not unfamiliar to history.
The lessons this book teaches are the lessons of history, not of literature. I have a small amount of familiarity, gained solely through reading, about that time and place. In those books, I read of people like the major characters presented in the book. But at least for me, Muller’s novel presents no added value to the history I already know. Great fiction has to be more than “litterature verite.” It needs to bring something to the table that history cannot, something that speaks to the human condition differently than a historian does. Muller’s writing lacked this, at least for me.
Michael Hofmann’s translation is poetic, meditative, disjointed, which I found appropriate for the tone and subject matter of Muller’s novel. I look forward to reading more of Muller’s work in the future, and hope to appreciate it more than I did “The Land of Green Plums.”
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