Reviews

• Romania has probably never been my idea of Paradise -- not when it was the outermost corner of the Roman Empire, not in the millennia since, not even today -- but it was surely closer to Hell on Earth during the phony-communist tyranny of Ceauçescu than ever before. Nevertheless, though 'everyone' around them was obsessed with fleeing at any risk, the four young dissidents of this novel were painfully ambiguous about exiling themselves. As it turned out, the first of them to flee wouldn't last long in Germany anyway. But given how vile and perilous life was for them in Romania, as described anyway, one HAS to ask what held them so tenaciously. Family? Yet their families were hateful. Idealism? Long shed! Fear of otherness? Well, yes, that for sure... The narrator is a young woman from a German-Romanian village, whose father had been an SS officer. Sent to the city for education and to make something of herself, she hooks up to three young men whose situations are similar. The narrator also forms tortured relationships with two women of her own age, a fellow student who commits suicide and the alienated daughter of a Party official of some importance. Is the narrator Herta Müller herself? Yes, of course, and no, of course not. The subject matter of Müller's novels is always the paranoic nightmare of life under the Dictatorship, with its interrogations, its betrayals, its abject corruption of all aspects of personality, but each novel tells a somewhat different story. As a reader, this time, I choose to think that "The Land of Green Plums" is a carefully crafted fiction, whatever details it may include from Müller's own experiences. It's all the more amazing that way. The poetic vividness of the narrator's memories need not be compromised by fact-checking. Vivid they are! Heart-rackingly personal, full of jagged coded symbolism, a whole interiorized secret language, in which 'fingernail clippers' mean 'interrogation' and 'blood drinking' stands for collaboration with the tyranny. This language is not always easily deciphered. It's fragmented and elusive, and any usual chronological constraints of narration do not apply. The narrator is simultaneously a village girl, a student, a woman the 'authorities' want to hound out of existence, and a atomized non-person-in-exile. What a powerful emotional tool Müller's cryptic coded language is, nevertheless! If anguish can ever be beautiful, Müller makes it so. Her originality and imagination are dazzling. I chose to read this book, Müller's best known, in English because of the respect I have for the skill of translator Michael Hofmann. Having read it once that way, I certainly plan to read it again in German. It's good enough for the effort. The German title, by the way, has nothing to do with plums; it's "Herztier", a made-up word meaning literally 'heart-beast'. The English translation is possibly misleading; "The Land of Green Plums" might suggest an aura of nostalgia or romanticism that doesn't fit the book on any level. There are 'green plums' in the story, but they are toxic to those who eat them in the presence of anything honorable. The six chief characters of Herztier are all 'dissidents'. They are perceived as such by the police, by their fellow students and colleagues at work, by their neighbors and families, even by strangers in the markets. One has to imagine them as 'standing out' conspicuously in how they dress, how they converse, how they cut or don't cut their hair. They are hated automatically, as 'beatniks' were in the 1950s in Middle America or 'skinheads' are today in many 'Free World' cities. One has to consider the possibility that their dissidence is deeper than political dissatisfaction. Don't they seem to realize as much, i.e. that they would be dissidents anywhere? The corruption and oppression that torments them in Romania is NOT just the weight of the totalitarian state, and Herztier is NOT just an agitprop critique of the "years of communism". Their society is as corrupt from the bottom up as from the top down. They are rejected and feared from below and above, most intensely by the little people around them who have accommodated, been coopted, perhaps even thrived on the police state. Many of the reviews of this book, and the blurb on the jacket, speak of Herta Müller's "triumph" against the corrosion of the totalitarian state. No question, Müller has triumphed as an artist, a Nobel prize winner. But I don't hear a blare of triumph - not even a bleat of relief - in her writing. Hers is a very bleak view of humanity as its own worst oppressor. It's a good thing she writes so well, or I wouldn't be able to tolerate her suffering.

• Excellently written and a warning to all of us.

• This book was used in a course i was studying and I'm so glad that it was introduced to me. The book is complicated at times as it jumps from memory and reality however Muller's main theme's are portrayed so well that you can't help wanting to know more. I loved this book but it may not be for everybody if your into European literature then this is a book I highly recommend!

• A Brilliant book from a Brilliant writer... One of the best for sure.

• My five-star rating has little to do with liking this book, or even understanding it. But it kept me reading with nightmare fascination. Herta Müller's recent Nobel Prize aside, this is clearly a major statement, whether as an historical document, a work of art, or the depiction from the inside of a mind fragmented by fear and the oppression of a totalitarian regime. For Müller, born to a German family in Romania, lived her young adult life under the repression of the Ceausescu state security apparatus, finally escaping to Germany in 1987 at the age of 34. Like fragments from a psychiatrist's couch that painfully piece themselves together into a coherent story, this is a scrapbook of spiritual debris, the record of a mind almost pulverized by pressure, that somehow managed to regain its sanity. The book begins in a series of surreal images: "A child refuses to let her nails be cut. This hurts, says the child. The mother ties the child to a chair with the belts from her dresses. [...] The child knows: the mother in her tightly-tied love is going to cut up my hands. Then she'll have to stick the cut-up fingers in the pocket of her housedress and go into the courtyard, as if she meant to throw them away. And in the yard, where no one can see her, she'll have to eat the child's fingers." This symbolic torture stands in for real torture, of which there is remarkably little in the book; the worst the state can do is reserved for the mind, not the body. Working more like poetry than prose, Müller's fragments swirl obsessively around a number of images: the evil green plums of the title, mulberries, animal blood, red-shanked sheep, dried cows' tails, nuts, river stones, nail-clippers, barbers, dentists, underwear, whisper-thin nylons with runs in them, snatches of song, strands of hair, physical disease, and an animal life-force constantly threatening to turn against its host. The latter entity, here translated as "heart-beast," gives the book its original German title, HERZTIER. Although the recurrent images become, if anything, even more obsessive throughout the book, it gradually edges into some kind of narrative focus. It seems to begin in the author's college days, when she is living with other girls in one dormitory while maintaining a cautious friendship with three men in another. Already they are under suspicion, whether as outsiders (all four are members of the German-speaking minority in Romania) or just by being intellectuals, and all are called in from time to time for interrogation. Nevertheless, all four graduate and are moved to stultifying jobs out of the city. But the atmosphere of fear only tightens, leading them all to compromise each other and, even worse, themselves. All eventually lose their posts, and most leave the country, as the author did herself. Though these emigrations seem surprisingly easy, they are no escape; the state has a wide reach. People mysteriously disappear in transit. Even in Germany, emigrés may receive death sentences by mail or telephone, and later suffer some fatal accident. Nobody is safe. And even if a person can escape with her life, as Müller did, the mental trauma may never be reversed. This remarkable book is the record of a person trying to put herself together piece by piece; she may not fully succeed, but the miracle is that she can even try.

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