A beautiful, haunting novel by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature
Herta M?ller was born in Timis, Romania in 1953. A vocal member of the German minority, she was forced to leave the country in 1987, and moved to Berlin, where she still lives. In 2009 she won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
With the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, Müller
depicts the language of the dispossessed
*Jury of the Nobel Prize for Literature*
Appropriately on the side of underdogs from Ceausescu's dystopia to
Ukrainian labour camps ... so opening the eyes of non-German
readers to new worlds. And that, from Beowulf to Müller, is a noble
as well as a Nobel function of literature
*The Times*
Especially now, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's a
beautiful signal that such high quality literature and this life
experience are being honoured
*Angela Merkel*
[Muller's] dark, closely observed and sometimes violent work often
explores exile and the grim quotidian realities of life under
Ceausescu... Her sensibility is often bleak, but the detail in her
fiction can whip it alive
*New York Times*
Graphically observed... forces the reader to confront the complex
tapestry of Eastern European history in the late 20th Century. And
although the author left Romania in the 1980s, she remains
interested in the issues of oppression and exile, which makes her a
universal writer
*Razia Iqbal, BBC Arts Correspondent*
Müller is courageous and has summoned her surrealist imagination to
brilliant effect when exposing the horrors of totalitarianism...
The Passport, which was published in Berlin in 1986, months before
she fled Romania, is an almost allegorical elegy of village life
dominated by the need to escape.... Müller uses the quality of
European folk tale to brilliant effect. Set in a German village in
Romania where the people dream of a different life in the West, the
story is true to any country in which fantasy is the only escape
from oppression... Politics and truth-telling, the courage of the
witness and the weight of the message often decides the Nobel
Literature Prize; in Herta Müller all of these elements are
present, yet so too is the artist as the lone voice beckoning,
intent on telling a story, on shaping a word picture
*Irish Times*
Müller has an eye for the surreal detail of a police state and has
made it into strong, muscular literature
*The Times*
Praise for The Passport: A phenomenal, moving and humbling novel,
perhaps the most memorable read of the autumn
*Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung*
Herta Müller's language is the purest poetry. Every sentence has
the rhythm of poetry, indeed is a poem or a painting
*Nurnerger Nachrichten*
Herta Muller portrays a community that is breaking up, a dying
village whose German inhabitants all seek to emigrate. At the
centre stands the miller Windisch waiting for his passport. Bribing
the mayor with sacks of flour proved in vain - so, now, in a rage
of helpnessness, he has to allow his daughter to visit the
militiaman and the priest, to search for passports and baptismal
certificates in their beds. The dirty realities of a totalitarian
state... a chilling, far-sighted and lyrical graveside speech for a
sad village in a sad land
*Neue Zurcher Zeitung*
Praise for The Land of Green Plums: A novel of graphically observed
detail in which the author seeks to create a sort of poetry out of
the spiritual and material ugliness of life in Communist
Romania
*New York Times*
A powerful autobiographical account, The Land of Green Plums...
will linger on in the mind
*Guardian*
The Land of Green Plums is a miracle, a fearless human testimony
which operates through the combined force of Müller's tight,
understated eloquence
*Irish Times*
If W G Sebald's The Emigrants suggested there are still new ways of
writing about exile and the Holocaust, The Land of Green Plums
promises similar possibilities for the literature of the Iron
Curtain
*Literary Review*
Praise for The Appointment: A brooding, fog-shrouded allegory of
life under the long oppression of the regime of Nicolae
Ceausescu
*New York Times*
[The Appointment] Müller scatters narrative bombshells across a
field of dreams
*San Francisco Chronicle*
What heightens this bleak vision is her startling, hallucinatory
use of metaphor and surreal imagery
*Observer*
At once spare and poetic, this novella-length tale nevertheless
attains the epic ponderousness that defines recent Laureates
*Daily Mail*
A swift, stinging narrative, fable-like in its stoic concision and
painterly detail
*Philadelphia Inquirer*
Müller writes with elegant simplicity, in the great tradition of
German storytelling - this would not look out of place in Hebel's
The Treasure Chest.
*The Times*
Müller provides a master class in sparse, clear prose, and conveys
the bleakness of humanity, with the occasional touch of dark,
bitter magic - fully earning her Nobel Prize for literature this
year... Often harrowing, startling, as devoid of decoration as the
world she is describing, Müller's work demands to be read.
*Independent on Sunday*
This short novel expands in the mind to occupy an emotional space
far beyond its short length or the seeming simplicity of its
story.
*TLS*
The Passport, the first of her novels to be translated into
English, is a stunning introduction to her jewel-like prose, hard
and clear as a diamond.
*Sacramento Book Review, USA*
I am struck by her sparse yet poetic language...it reminds very
much of our literature during apartheid, although this one is of a
very high literary merit.
*Sunday Independent, South Africa*
|
Ask a Question About this Product More... |
|
