06/03/2011

"the land of green plums"


She is a small woman in black with short-cut hair, pale face, thin lips outlined in dark red. Looking at her picture, she seems at once vulnerable and defiant. Herta Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize (2009) as a German writer born in Romania. Her prize raised eyebrows both in Germany and in her native Banat, a province in Transylvania where almost everyone spoke German. Literary critics found that she was not German enough, for her lyrical language and tendency to invent words puzzling the reader over what they meant. Her novels reveal life behind the Iron Curtain of Ceausescu’s Romanian dictatorship in a direct horrifying style. Romanians never really talked about her as one of their own.

I have just finished The Land of Green Plums (1994), one of her most accessible books in English translation. The narrative is painfully realistic, filled with daily humiliations, deprivations and an overwhelming sense of fear and menace shared by all. The book follows a group of university friends of Müller – the “Aktionsgruppe Banat”, all of them writers – who manage to resist the communist regime’s urge to living in a state-controlled world of spies. A sense of outrage, endured in silence, never mentioned, is at the core of Herta Müller’s writing. In The Land of Green Plums, a few of the group try to escape to the West and are killed in the attempt. Müller herself succeeded in fleeing Romania in 1987. Since then, she hasn’t stop writing novels, poetry and essays. Words never stopped calling her. Saved by a painful memory, the writer leaves us thinking about the strange distance between childhood and youth under dictatorship and the magnificent power of writing. “When I write, I clutch at the love of words”, she says to state the saving grace of living in words, her love of the spoken language and her incessant efforts to encompass in narratives the horrors that life presented. 

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