Herta Müller: The Land of Green Plums
Herta Müller the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009, published this impressive novel of life in Ceauşescu's Romania in 1994. It was awarded the Dublin Impac Literary Award in 1998.
Müller was born in 1953 in the Banat on the western edge of Romania, near the city of Timisoara. Since the mid-18th century the region has been home to communities of Swabians who have retained their language, customs and allegiances throughout the Banat's troubled history. That allegiance to their German heritage led some of them to embrace Nazism - as was the case with the narrator's father in what is, I suspect, a heavily autobiographical novel.
Müller studied German and Romanian literature and culture in Timisoara, and later worked as a teacher and translator until she ran foul of the Securitate, the notorious secret police. After losing her position she became a kindergarten teacher before obtaining permission in 1987 to emigrate to Germany. She now lives in Berlin and is the author of several novels and collections of essays. Besides winning the Impac award, which established her reputation in the English-speaking world, she has received several notable prizes and distinctions, including Germany's prestigious Kleist Prize. The Nobel Prize will, no doubt, generate further interest in the work of a writer with an individual and memorable voice – even in translation.
Müller's experiences as a German-speaking Romanian, doubly vulnerable therefore in a brutally repressive world, have obviously entered into the fabric of this wayward and haunting work. At its centre stand four young people: the narrator and her Swabian-Romanian friends Kurt, Edgar and Georg. All four - students in an unnamed city which was probably modelled on Timisoara - fall under the suspicion of the Securitate and the sadistic Captain Pjele, whose sadism is all the more appalling because of his deceptive restraint.
Other characters, who float in and out of this shadowy, impressionistic book, represent the region's complicated network of nationalities and allegiances. There is Lola "from the south of the country and she reeked of poor province" who, early in the novel, hangs herself in the student dormitory. She was unable to find a man in a white shirt, having to make do with the brutal love of factory hands and abattoir workers. Tongues and kidneys, gifts from her blood-stained lovers, slowly dry and harden at the back of the dormitory fridge.
Frau Margit, a Hungarian, dreams of returning one day to Budapest, though she knows that there would be no-one there for her. Tereza, the daughter of a sculptor much favoured by the party, owns more whisper-thin nylons than anyone. She betrays the narrator and her friends before being betrayed herself, in a way, by the hard nut growing under her arm. The world of Herr Feyerabend, a Jew, has contracted into a small space where he tends his cat, Elsa, and where he forever polishes a pair of shoes. And in villages and farms elderly Swabians cling to their traditional way of life: they sew clothes, bottle fruit, practice their religion and sing their Nazi songs.
Müller's material is familiar enough from "dissident" Eastern European fiction: an almost commonplace story of repression, secrecy, suspicion and the ever-present sense that no aspect of life, no matter how trivial or banal, can be normal in such a world. Everyone is doomed, even those who manage to escape or to obtain a passport from the iron-faced authorities. The tone and atmosphere are predictably gloomy and depressed, appropriately so, perhaps, for a work written at a time when Ceauşescu’s brutal dictatorship remained a vivid memory.
Where this fine book is sharply differentiated, however, from others of its kind is in its intricate, allusive construction and in Müller's highly metaphoric, though precise diction - its somnambulistic cadences are beautifully captured in Michael Hofmann's translation. This is predominantly a novel of images. It slews backwards and forwards in time, focusing on vivid, at times surreal, vignettes: a child tied to a chair while having her nails trimmed; an elderly, distracted man standing beside a dry fountain, waiting, waiting.
The narrator and her friends play obsessively with a child's toy, a grotesque pecking chicken. A seamstress reads palms while her children suck on indelible pencils. The everyday and the ordinary are converted into sinister and menacing visions, especially when we glimpse the loutish secret police in ill-fitting suits gorging themselves on unripe plums - hence the novel's English title. Elsewhere nail-clippers, strands of hair, a moth-eaten fur hat, thistles growing by the wayside and even a sluggish river take on an alarming existence.
This vision of life in a totalitarian world is made unforgettable by Müller's poetic sensibility. Images and metaphors, rather than characters or narrative, carry the novel's intellectual and even political charge. In that it reveals, I think, a fundamentally feminine cast of mind. And also feelings, preoccupations, fears and hopes bred out of immediate experiences. In short, the novel struck me as wholly authentic.
One thing puzzles me. The original German title, Herztier, is best translated as "Heart-Beast" or “Heart-Animal”. References are scattered throughout the book to this strange concept, which might stand for the soul or perhaps for some inner driving force. The precise implication of the word, if indeed it has any, is unclear - perhaps this is a fragment of Swabian-Romanian folklore. The English title is apt enough but, from my point of view, it is too romantic (and even perhaps sensuous) for this bleak fable with the flickering intensity of a nightmare.
This is a revised version of a review originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald on 12 December 1998.
The Book
Mueller, Herta: The Land of Green Plums / translated by Michael Hofmann. - NORTHWESTERN UNIV PR, 1998. - 242 p.
ISBN 0-8101-1597-2 Original title: Herztier (German)
