The Land of Green Plums (original 1994; edition 1998)

Harrowing in a quiet, implacable way. ( )

this is a confusing, lyrical, visual, beautiful jumble. it's nonlinear and confusing on purpose, as it's describing life under a dictator's regime, and how so much doesn't make sense in that world. i'm sure that if i didn't know what this book was about before i started, i'd still not know. i liked a lot of the writing, but this was a challenge for me.

"How do you have to live, I wondered, to be in harmony with what you honestly think?" ( )

Because we were afraid, Edgar, Kurt, Georg, and I met every day. We sat together at a table, but our fear stayed locked within each of our heads, just as we'd brought it to our meetings. We laughed a lot, to hide it from each other. But fear always finds an out. If you control your face, it slips into your voice. If you manage to keep a grip on your face and your voice, as if they were dead wool, it will slip out through your fingers. It will pass through your skin and lie there. You can see it lying around on objects close by.

The unnamed female narrator paints a picture of life in Romania under a dictatorship. The narrator and three male friends, all college students from provincial villages, come under surveillance for an unspecified reason. The four are aware that they're being watched, and their fear and paranoia increase with the passage of months and years as they await their uncertain future. Their friendship disintegrates as the few freedoms they have are gradually taken away from them.

This wasn't an easy read. The author uses a lot of symbolism, and I'm sure I missed plenty of it. It probably didn't help that I was reading the English translation, my only option since I don't speak German. I suspect that this was a difficult book to translate because of the nature of the book. Language seems to be an important aspect of the book, and the author most likely used words for a specific purpose for which there isn't an exact English equivalent. More experienced readers of this kind of fiction will be able to appreciate this novel more than I did, particularly if they're able to read it in its original German. ( )

Four university students get together regularly to discuss poetry, literature, and even songs. The students share, not only a love for literature, but also a common background. All four are from small towns and are trying to create a new, intellectual identity away from their parents' provincial ways. Sounds innocuous and age appropriate, unless you live in a totalitarian regime where dissenting minds are taken as serious threats to the state.

The narrator of the story is one of the members, and the only female in the group. When one of her roommates, Lola, is found dead in the closet, the narrator takes and hides Lola's diary so that it won't be found by the political police. Shaken by guilt at not being a better friend and frightened by the subsequent searches of her room, the narrator tells her cohort members, and they work out a system to warn each other when they have been searched, followed, or taken in for questioning by the enigmatic Captain Pjele.

The pressure and tension does not relent once the four are out of school and working in unfulfilling jobs. The political police threaten their families, deny them their vocations, and increase the physical threats. The only way to live seems to be to flee the country, although few hold out any hope at all of escaping and have seen the evidence of failed escapes, or to commit suicide. In a world where neither the countryside nor the city provides safety and relationships are overshadowed by the constant fear of betrayal, people live shadow lives. In the end, each of the four must decide how they are going to continue and face the consequences of their choices.

Herta Müller, like her characters, suffered a double persecution in communist Romania under Ceauşescu. First, as an intellectual, a young person who left her provincial village to seek education and a modicum of freedom in the city; and second, as a member of the Banat Swabians, a German-speaking minority group. The characters and plot of the novel are based on these two tensions: life in a totalitarian state and life as a minority. But the characters are not well-developed, and the plot is confusing at times. Instead of focusing on the concrete (such as setting in story in time and place), the author focuses on the sensations and appetites of the characters, their distrust yet dependence on one another, and the bleak numbness of spirit which corrodes and corrupts insidiously. Müller is a poet, and the hopeless landscape of the mind when faced with such a regime is the focus of her word pictures and metaphors. The result is less a story of individuals, despite at least one of the characters being a person from Müller's own youth, than a collage of flat emotions and colorless landscapes.

This is the second of Müller's books which I've read, the first being Hunger Angel. Although I can appreciate both the author's experiences which are reflected in the pages and the fictitious stories, the emotional emptiness of the books carries over into my connection with them. I'm glad I delved into this Nobel Laureate's world for a time, but I'm not sure I will return. ( )

In Romania during Ceaucescu's reign of terror, young people from the impoverished country fled to the cities,thinking they'd find better prospects for themselves there. Instead, they find continued oppression under the totalitarian dictator's regime. The atmosphere is rife with fear, tension, misery and paranoia.

It took me a while to get into the writing, and I'm not sure if it's because of the translations or if the original wasn't written as smoothly either. Some phrases were repeated, and I'm sure there must have been some symbolism behind the oft repeated mention of the green plums which lend themselves to the title, but apart from signifying greed, I couldn't see what else they could have been referring to.

If you're into stark and depressing dystopian stories, this will be right up your alley. ( )