Herta Muller; trans. Michael Hofmann
The Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller, the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is translated by Michael Hofmann. Like Muller, the unnamed narrator of the novel is of the German-speaking minority in Romania; and, like Muller, her father was in the SS. Along with her three friends, the narrator tries to navigate as best she can while living under the watchful eyes of the government.
One never knows what to expect. The narrator and her three friends are routinely followed by mysterious-looking men. They are periodically called in for interrogation by a government official accompanied by his menacing dog. The goal is to intimidate them into submission. The friends are constantly looking over their shoulders, reading and hiding banned books, speaking in code, subject to searches of their personal belongings, and live with the uncertainty of who to trust and/or who may be a potential informer. Conversations are halting since people are afraid to articulate their thoughts aloud. Peppered throughout are references of disappearances, suicides, escapes, and people being killed while trying to escape. Two of the three friends are found dead under mysterious circumstances.
The narrative is sporadic in nature, with stops and starts of vignettes that thread themselves throughout the novel. The erratic flow captures the jagged atmosphere of fear and trepidation Romanians experienced while living under Ceausescu’s dictatorship. Rather than adhering to a plot, the narrative creates an atmosphere of fear, ambivalence, harassment, deprivation, and uncertainty. Shortages of food and material goods leave the population so hungry that some resort to nefarious means to satisfy their hunger. Some drink animal blood; some stuff themselves with stolen green plums; others exchange sex for food. Women are particularly vulnerable and subject to sexual assault by men in police uniforms or in military garb.
With her unflinching lens, Herta Muller successfully captures the haunting and menacing atmosphere of life under a dictatorship and its long-term corrosive consequences.
Not an easy read, but a powerful one.