Herta Müller

A collection of stories on life in Romania under Communism, illustrating the violence and the corruption. They are based on the writer's experience in her youth, in a village in the German-speaking part of the country.

""I've been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp." Thus begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceausescu's totalitarian regime. She is riding a tram on her way to answer a summons from the secret police. She has been questioned before; this time, she believes, will be worse. She has brought along a towel and her toothbrush in case she's not allowed to return home. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. "Marry me," the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country.". "As each tram stop brings the young woman closer to the appointment, her thoughts stray to her bus-driver father and his infidelities; to her friend Lilli, shot trying to flee to Hungary; to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them; to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers; and to Paul, her lover, her one source of trust, despite his constant drunkenness. In her distraction, she misses her stop, finding herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the interrogation pale by comparison."--BOOK JACKET.

Poems formed by collages of words and images.

Das eindrucksvolle Bild einer Lebenserfahrung unter absoluter Herrschaft: Herta Müller, die bedeutende und sprachmächtige Autorin, wuchs auf im Rumänien unter der Diktatur Ceausescus. Hier erfuhr sie Sprache als Instrument der Unterdrückung, aber auch als Möglichkeit des Widerstands und der Selbstbehauptung gegenüber der totalitären Macht. Und dieses Sprachbewusstsein stellt sie neben Erinnerungen an die Kindheit in den Mittelpunkt ihrer poetischen und politischen Selbstbefragung.

It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a Gulag camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless hunger in a world where one shovel load of coal is worth one gram of bread. In this 2009 novel, Nobel Laureate Herta Müller conjures the distorted world of the Soviet labor camp in all its physical and moral absurdity with poetic intensity and dispassionate precision. The Hunger Angel was based upon the based on the true story of the poet Oskar Pastior, who died before it was published.

"An early masterpiece from the winner of the Nobel Prize hailed as the laureate of life under totalitarianism. Romania--the last months of the Ceausescu regime. Adina is a young schoolteacher. Paul is a musician. Clara works in a wire factory. Pavel is Clara's lover. But one of them works for the secret police and is reporting on all of the group. One day Adina returns home to discover that her fox fur rug has had its tail cut off. On another occasion it's the hindleg. Then a foreleg. The mutilated fur is a sign that she is being tracked by the secret police--the fox was ever the hunter. Images of photographic precision combine into a kaleidoscope of terror as Adina and her friends struggle to keep mind and body intact in a world pervaded by complicity and permeated with fear, where it's hard to tell victim from perpetrator. In The Fox Was Always a Hunter, Herta Müller once again uses language that displays the "concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose"--As the Swedish Academy noted upon awarding her the Nobel Prize--to create a hauntingly cinematic portrayal of the corruption of the soul under totalitarianism"--

Een naar Duitsland uitgeweken vluchtelinge voor het dictatoriale regime in Roemenië voelt zich ontheemd.