Herta Müller, Nobel prizewinner 2009, has yet to convince Tibor Fischer of her artistry.
The Passport by Herta Müller, translated by Martin Chalmers (Serpent’s Tail)
Nadirs by Herta Müller, translated by Sieglinde Lug (Nebraska)
I have a lot of sympathy for anyone who grew up in Ceausescu’s Romania. In Hungary, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, even in East Germany, things weren’t great for the majority, but if you behaved, you could have peace and a modicum of comfort. Not in Romania. Behaving didn’t help.
By the 1980s it was a very poor, nasty and strange place where typewriters had to be registered and where, once, with one packet of cigarettes as a bribe, I managed to open an entire closed restaurant in the centre of Bucharest.
It was miserable for everyone except the ruling elite and it was doubly miserable for the minorities, the two million Hungarians and the Germans, from whose ranks came this year’s Nobel prizewinner for literature, Herta Müller.
Ceausescu operated a mild form of ethnic cleansing, selling his Germans to West Germany and making conditions so tough for the Hungarians that many opted for an easier life across the border in Budapest. Müller and her fellow writer and husband, Richard Wagner, quit Romania in 1987.
Two of Müller’s books are available in English at present — a ”novel”, The Passport (first published in 1989), and Nadirs, a short-story collection. Another novel, The Land of Green Plums, is scheduled to be reissued by Granta later this month.
Of all the writers who’ve won the Nobel prize, Müller must have the most rudimentary prose style. The citation from the Nobel committee refers to the ”frankness of prose”. With the possible exception of Dan Brown or Barbara Taylor Bradford, prose doesn’t come any franker than this.
Sentences such as ”The plums were green and ripe” or ”Windisch shivers” don’t occur as a punchy contrast to sesquipedalian descriptions or Proustian concatenations of clauses. This is Müller’s staple fare, the basic building block, indeed almost the only building block she deigns to use.
Half of her sentences are fewer than 10 words long and few are more than 14. If concision and clarity of expression is your pleasure, she delivers to the front door. You could fit three of her stories into this review. The short story collection, The Passport, and her Impac award-winning, The Land of Green Plums, all focus on village life in 1970s Romania and often read like Thomas Hardy abridged for six-year-olds. If her work had been handed to me in a creative writing class I’d be pleading for the use of a subordinate clause every now and then.
Presumably there is something going on in the German original that gives Müller’s words greater appeal and colour. I know enough intelligent, cultured Germans who admire her work to suspect that something significant is being shed in the rendering.
The short-story collection, Nadirs, was Müller’s first book, published in 1982 in Romania in a ”censored” form and I think I can guess which bits fell by the wayside. The official policy towards minorities under Ceausescu was love and nurture, so work was published in German and Hungarian, though the officially sanctioned stuff was usually tosh or full of abasement sycophancy to the ”Conductor”.
Some of the stories in Nadirs (although texts might be a better term) are so matter of fact and so inconsequential that I read them three or four times to confirm I wasn’t missing something.
The Swabian Bath is about a Swabian family having a bath on a Saturday night. As it’s 1970s Romania, the whole family uses the same tub and water: ”The little gray rolls of Mother, of Father, of Grandma, and of Grandpa are whirling down the drain.”
I can imagine that, as a performance piece, read aloud, this might have some musicality and life, but it slumps pointlessly on the page. Similarly, The Intervillage Bus is the obiter dicta of passengers on an inter-village bus.
There are also pieces that are more playful and indeed abstruse. I had to read Workday, which closes the collection, several times because of its topsy-turvy, almost reverse-time account of getting to the office, with surreal lines such as ”three stops before getting on, I get off”.
The Passport is a 90-page novel about a miller, Windisch, a Swab, or ethnic German, who applies for a passport to leave Romania. That’s all in the way of plot or narrative impetus. The style is as clipped as that of Nadirs and the setting is the same: rural Romania. The vignettes are reminiscent of Nadirs but linked together by the wandering Windisch.
The original German title of the book was Man Is a Large Pheasant in the World (a Romanian proverb that underlines man’s status as prey for fate), which better captures the growth of the poetic, oracular elements in Müller’s writing. If you don’t know why there are Swabs in the Banat, Saxons in Transylvania and Hungarians in both regions, a lot of this won’t make much sense to you.
Müller was in her mid-30s when she left Romania and, although Romania has remained her main preoccupation, I find it a cerebral, processed Romania, more art than likeness (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
The Hungarian writer, Gyorgy Dragoman, left Romania as a child, but if you want a book that replicates the grim lunacy of Ceausescu’s reign, his novel The White King is the one to go for. —
