The Land of Green Plums by Herta Muller, Michael Hofmann (Translator)

From the Publisher

Set in Romania at the height of Ceauescu's reign of terror, The Land of Green Plums tells the story of a group of young people who leave the impoverished province for the city in search of better prospects and camaraderie. But their hopes are ravaged, because the city, no less than the countryside, bears everywhere the mark of the dictatorship's corrosive touch. All the narrator's friends—teachers and students of vaguely dissident allegiance—betray her, do away with themselves, or both. As they do so, we see the way the totalitarian state comes to inhabit every human realm and how everyone, even the strongest, must either bend to the oppressors or resist them and thereby perish.
Herta Müller, herself a survivor of Ceausescu's police state, speaks from intimate experience. Scene by scene, in language at once harsh and poetic, she constructs a devastating picture of a society and a generation ruined by fear. In simple images of hieroglyphic power—policeman filling their pockets and mouths with green plums; girls sleeping with abattoir workers for bags of offal; a docile proletariat making things no one wants—"tin sheep and wooden watermelons"—Müller anatomizes a country and its citizens and the corruption that has rotted the core of both.

New York Times Book Review - Larry Wolff

Muller's vision . . .reads like a kind of fairy tale on the mingled evils of gluttony, stupidity and brutality.

Publishers Weekly

Five Romanian youths under the Ceausescu regime are the focus of this moving depiction of the struggle to become adults who keep "eyes wide open and tightly shut at the same time." Through the suicide of a mutual friend, the unnamed narrator, a young woman studying to become a translator, meets a trio of young men with whom she shares a subjugated political and philosophic rebelliousness. The jobs the state assigns them after graduation pull each to a different quadrant of the country, and this, as well as the narrator's new friendship with the daughter of a prominent Party member, strains their relations. The group manages to maintain its closeness anyway, through coded letters bearing strands of the sender's hair as a tamper-warning. As the friends begin to lose their jobs and grow weary of being followed, threatened and pulled in for semi-regular interrogations, each one thinks increasingly about escape. Terrifyingly, the narrator finds herself changing into a stranger: "someone who keeps company with misery, to make sure it stays put." Making her American debut, Mller is well-served by the workmanlike translation; though her lyrical writing falters badly at times (such as the baffling, repeated metaphor that gives the book its title), it also soars to rarefied heights. Most importantly, few books have conveyed with such clarity the convergence of terror and boredom under totalitarianism.

Library Journal

In this new novel by the Romanian-born Mller, winner of Germany's prestigious Kleist Prize, a young woman and four of her friends struggle to maintain some degree of normalcy during the final decay of Ceausescu's regime in Romania. Throughout, the systematic tightening of the dictator's deathgrip, which slowly squeezes out every possible private aspect of individual and family life, haunts unrelentingly. The spare, discordant writing shifts from the stark realities of the present to dreamlike fragments of the heroine's childhood and life in the country, effectively juxtaposing urban and rural, where a semblance of humanity manages to survive. In the country, Grandmother wanders through fields singing and collecting sparrow's feathers; Grandfather spends his days playing chess and visiting the barber for a haircut; and city guards and children gorge on little green plums, which the country folk say is like "swallowing your death," the soft pits "burning your heart up from the inside." Many Western readers should come to appreciate Mller, whose work recalls the writing of Croatian Slavenka Drakulic (e.g., Marble Skin, LJ 1/94). Recommended for both public and academic libraries supporting world literature.- Kathleen Marszycki, Rathbun Free Memorial Lib., Wethersfield, Ct.

Larry Wolff

Muller's vision . . .reads like a kind of fairy tale on the mingled evils of gluttony, stupidity and brutality. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

Young lives of quiet desperation under dictator Ceauescu are the poignant focus of Kleist Prizewinner Müller's third novel but her first to be translated into English.

Systematic oppression snuffs first the spirit, then the existence, of those few young Romanians brave enough to dare to think independently. Sharing a college dorm room in the city with Lola and four other women, the narrator inhabits a Big Brotherlike world where loudspeakers blare proletarian music all day, where a longing for privacy is suspect, and personal belongings are regularly searched. Lola, a girl from the provinces, has adjusted to the awful poverty of student life. She joins the Communist Party to gain some small status. She exchanges sex for food to supplement her pinched diet. And she keeps a journal of surrealist observations to lift her spirits. But none of it helps: She eventually hangs herself. Shaken, the narrator befriends a trio of male students, Georg, Edgar, and Kurt, discovering in them a questioning, restless spirit much like her own. Together, they walk, talk, read forbidden books, and ultimately are brought in for police interrogation and intimidation. Graduation throws them back among the masses in the working world, but they stay in touch by letters and visits in spite of ongoing state harassment. When all but one of them lose their jobs, however, the pressure becomes unbearable: Georg, beaten by thugs and deeply depressed, is allowed to emigrate to Germany, where he jumps (or is pushed) to his death from a window in Frankfurt; Edgar, the narrator, and the narrator's mother are also permitted to depart, leaving Kurt, still employed, behind. He soon finds his own release, at the end of a rope.

Not a pretty picture by any means, but, still, a powerful, affecting story—one that makes clear the real value of small triumphs and fleeting moments of happiness when they occur in the context of deprivation and incalculable loss.

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