This is what life was like in communist Romania under Nicolai Ceausescu, according to Herta Muller's fictional memoir:

"The gym instructor was the first to raise his hand. All the other hands flew up after his. While raising their hands, everybody looked up at the raised hands of the others. If someone's own hand wasn't as high as the others', he would stretch his arm a little farther. People kept their hands up until their fingers grew tired and started to droop and their elbows began to feel heavy and pull downward. Everyone looked around, and since no one else's arm was lowered, they straightened their fingers again and extended their elbows. Sweat stains showed under the arms; shirts and blouses came untucked. Necks were stretched, ears turned red, lips parted and stayed half-open. Heads kept still, while eyes slid from side to side.
"It was so quiet among the hands, someone said inside the cube, that you could hear the breathing up and down the wooden benches. And it stayed that quiet until the gym instructor laid his arm across the lectern and said: There's no need to count, of course we're all in favor."

I like this book for the picture it gives of that era, which is of interest to me.
I don't like it because it's just so strange. Great writing, perhaps, but not the sort of writing that my brain processes very well. ( )

The Land of Green Plums is a magnificent book; it's clear why it won the Impac Dublin Award. That said, it will not be every reader's cup of tea and let me tell you why:

The novel is very artful; it's craft reflective of the story it is telling. The story is set in Romania in the 1970s, while the country was under Communism and the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu (a quick read of the wikipedia entry for this period is a vivid reminder of what that meant). It tells the story of four college friends —three guys and a young woman— each of whom have moved from the countryside to university with hopeful expectations which are fairly quickly dashed. Imagine the university experience in an atmosphere of fear and without freedom of speech. The narrator is the young woman (I'll be darned if I can find her name), and one of the first dramatic events in the novel is when one of her roommates is found hanging in the dorm room's closet - an alleged suicide. Much of the story is told in images - sometimes I thought it resembled a kind of fairy tale language, other times a kind of poetry or a code, and at first I worked hard to decipher it. Somewhere, about 50 pages in, I relaxed and stopped trying so hard. It feels like a code, but it's really a language and by then I was really hooked.

There are a lot of reoccurring images, but there are a few which she carries through the entire story: hair-cutting, fingernail-cutting, grass growing & cutting, teeth & losing teeth, nylon stockings, organs and blood, losing buttons, mulberry trees, and green plums ("You can't eat green plums, the pits are still soft, and you'll swallow your death").

The young woman and her friends have a collection of books, photographs, original poetry and the diary of the woman who had allegedly committed suicide (she left her diary in the narrator's suitcase!) which they take turns hiding from the authorities, even after they all leave university and move into jobs that the state dictates for them. Each of them is subjected to fairly regular interrogation by the local police captain, and their living spaces are searched from time to time. They expect to be arrested at any time. What will happen to the four of them?

The novel, in its artful language of imagery, communicates to the reader — and here, I think, the prose works much like poetry — what it was like to live in constant fear, to not have the ability to talk freely or to trust easily. It conveys the poverty and the brutality of the time, and the peril in resisting the oppression. It's mesmerizing and potent, and stays with you long after you have finished the story.

*interestingly, as the book progresses the imagery becomes thinner. ( )

Like the narrator of her novel The Land of Green Plums, Herta Muller grew up a German minority in Ceausescu's Romania, which she eventually left to settle in Germany. Her own experience lends credibility to the voice of her young narrator, who inhabits a deprived police state in which minorities such as the ethnic Germans suffer persecution beyond the quotidian oppressions of Ceausescu's regime. The title refers to the young woman's observations of the swaggering policemen who wolf down plums from the city trees, even while they're still green; the act serves as a symbol of greed, arbitrary power, and stupidity. Although an element of the story is survival, achieved by clinging to the German culture and language, the novel also confronts the older characters' sympathy with the Nazis. Nevertheless, Muller's fictional heroine finds salvation, as she herself did, in modern Germany.