The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2009 has been awarded to the German writer
Herta Müller, Romanian by birth, and a Berliner by fate. Although her name
will be unfamiliar to many Anglophone readers, her books have been
translated into English sporadically, since The Land of Green Plums
(published in German in 1993) appeared in Michael Hofmann's translation in
1998. That novel won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award – "the
world's most lavish literary prize", as NB duly noted – when it was the
only piece of translated fiction on the short list. D. J. Enright reviewed
the book for the TLS (see below). But the paper had first noted Müller as an
eloquent new voice from Germany as far back as 1989, when a notice appeared
in a "European bookshop" round-up of new titles: "She is
currently admired as one of the most gifted writers in the German language".
Then as now, her subject was "the landscape of the dispossessed";
the Swedish Academy found that this Müller has depicted "with the
concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose".
D. J. Enright's review of The Land of Green Plums was published in the TLS
of July 17, 1998.
In The Land of Green Plums Herta Mueller contrives an original approach to a
subject which has often been treated before: everyday life under tyranny, in
this case in Romania during the 1980s. The treatment is largely
un-sensational, as such things go, an account, rather, of the continuous and
pervasive erosion of humanity. The narrator, an unnamed young woman, and her
three friends, Georg, Edgar and Kurt, students when we first meet them, are
the children of former SS men of German extraction. This makes them
unrepresentative, but presumably they are the kind of people Mueller knows
best, and perhaps their stand against the regime, however ineffectual, is
the more admirable for it.
A malaise, or miasma, hangs over the whole country. Madmen and drunks roam the
streets; the factories, staffed by peasants attracted to the city, turn out
rubbish, "tin sheep and wooden melons"; the slaughterhouse-workers
drink blood hot from the cows; schoolchildren want to be officers and
policemen when they grow up; sex is brutish or apathetic, a mode of
self-protection or self-punishment, and perfect fear has cast out love; even
the word "ciao" echoes the first syllable of a certain name. The
few touches of humour are queasy. When the narrator's mother is locked up by
the village policeman for ten hours pending interrogation, she passes the
time in cleaning his office. Earlier on, in the hope of improving her son's
grades, Georg's mother makes a pair of trousers for the headmaster: "At
the crotch, she took a deep breath and asked: And where do you carry the key
to the cellar, Mr Headmaster, on the left or the right?" The sinister
Captain Pjele contends that a poem the young people adopt as their anthem is
an incitement to leave the country. When told it is an old folk-song, so
much the worse, he says, those were different times, and "today our
people sing different songs". Kurt is forced to eat the paper the poem
is written on.
On another occasion the narrator is made to strip, and her items of clothing,
watch, handkerchief, lipstick are scrupulously noted down. She imagines
Pjele will realize that some of her hairs are missing; the friends place
hairs in their letters to tell whether they have been opened.
The subversive activities of the group are slight and innocuous – harbouring
unsuitable German books, humming scraps of banned songs, writing to one
another in crude code, taking photographs of the blacked-out buses which
carry prisoners between the prison and the construction sites – and their
motivation is left unexamined, or taken for granted. But it is central to
the theme, as it is to historical truth, that the agents of a totalitarian
state concern themselves assiduously with trivial misdemeanours; their
function is not merely to track down dissidents, but to create them too.
That is what a "reign of terror" means. And generalized terror is
what in the end, though the end may be long in coming, brings the regime
down.
The "conspirators" strike us as oddly childlike, and it isn't easy
to distinguish between the narrator's adult life and the flashbacks to her
childhood; common to both is a sense of precariousness and distrust, an
atmosphere reminiscent of some grim folk-tale. But then, no one can grow up
under a dictatorship, "because everything stays small when it's being
watched". At moments, the friends turn into enemies, resenting each
other; having friends prevents them from committing suicide. At one point,
the narrator plans to daub the Captain's house with her excrement, but
doesn't find the right address. She fancies naively that writing poems,
taking photographs, and humming forbidden tunes will gradually create such
hatred in the minds of "the graveyard makers" that all of them,
including the dictator, will lose their heads. (On the contrary, hatred
fuels them.) One of her friends proposes, more realistically but forlornly,
that if only one person, the right one, had to leave the country, everyone
else would be able to stay.
The collapse of Ceausescu's regime doesn't feature in the present story. After
various humiliations, three of the friends are allowed to emigrate to
Germany (as, we gather, Herta Mueller was). The narrator, in Berlin,
receives death threats through the mail from the obsessed Captain, who had
told them after each interrogation how lucky they were to have him. Georg
throws himself out of a sixth-floor room in Frankfurt; or perhaps was
pushed. Sunk in despair and deeming himself contaminated, Kurt stays behind
in Romania and is found hanged.
The novels ends as it began: "When we don't speak, said Edgar, we become
unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves." The words sum
up the plight of Mueller's young rebels, and also hint at the problems faced
by anyone writing about past and well-documented evils. Weird, allusive and
confusing though the author's way of tackling the subject may be, and a
little heavy on symbols, she achieves her end none the less. The Land of
Green Plums (which has won the 1998 International IMPAC Dublin Literary
Award) is unnervingly claustrophobic. We come to feel we are ourselves
thwarted would-be escapers. "You think you're innocent", says an
official, "but no one gets beaten up without cause."
Herta Mueller
THE LAND OF GREEN PLUMS
Translated by Michael Hofmann.
242pp. Granta Books. Paperback, £9.99.
1 86207 227 2
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