Last year’s Nobel prize winner’s (whom I come to write about somewhat belatedly, unfortunately) book is even worse than Le Clézio’s (2008 Nobel winner) Fever, that I tried reading and did not review on this blog. I emphasize the titles of the books because I have not read their new laureates’ other works, I have no intention of doing so, and there is a theoretical possibility they might be better. I have not heard of either of the two authors prior to their Swedish triumphs, and I don’t feel exceptionally enriched by hearing about them. But, all is not bad, reading them helped me shape an opinion on the Nobel prize in literature.
So, what is Hezrtier? I was reading it in original German. Ms. Müller is an author of Romanian descent. Similar to Franz Kafka (forgive me for mentioning 
these two people in the same sentence), she was brought up in a German environment and her mother tongue is German. Ms. Müller was oppressed by the Ceauşescu regime, she emigrated to Germany where she married and where she became (so we are told) a successful author. Herztier is about a woman oppressed by the regime in Romania and who, at the end of the book, flees to Germany. How is the story told? It is told in a series of details, rarely do we get to see the big picture. For example: the writer, when her characters and brought to Securitate offices for questioning, doesn’t write about the reasons for this, or what exactly transpires during the questioning, or what effect it had on her characters. She writes about the police commissioner’s dog and his bold head. This approach needn’t necessarily be that bad, in itself. Unfortunately – it is. Surely, rarely does something big happen in life. Life is a series of more or less significant details that shape us, what we do and who we are. Accordingly, if we accept this, we can go on to claim that it is a great gift to actively look for these details, like a detective, and to store these little symptoms of different conditions for later use in writing. A person, situation, feeling, just about anything, can be described more vividly with a single well-observed and well-placed detail than with many paragraphs of trying to contain the illusive. Great masters of effective usage of details are Raymond Chandler and John Le Carré. If you’ve read them, you know what I mean.
But to narrate a whole book in such observations, many of which are failed, incomprehensible, meaningless, tedious… Even if they weren’t one should not deprive a book of its layers. Details are details. They are not the story, not the dialogues, not the psychology, not the political-historical background. What better example than the title itself: Herztier. Herztier translates as ‘Heart animal’ or perhaps ‘animal’s heart.’ ‘Heart of an animal?’ Anyway, in reading the book, one wonders what this signifies. Every now and then the author mentions, as her main character interacts with her grandmother or mother that her Herztier is found, or lost, or something like that. But what does this mean? Reading such passages, and there are many and not only confined to odd neologisms, I was genuinely physically repulsed. For God’s sake, this means nothing! It’s some random thing some woman is saying to make herself interesting and insightful. But the line between being a mastermind detective of life (again: Chandler, Le Carré, Roth) and bored person saying random things in not a thin one, and it should be easy to separate the two. Ms. Müller’s sentences are ultra-short, just like her paragraphs. I have no strong standing on this. Her sentences seem too short but it hard not to be biased, considering how strongly I dislike her entire approach. Some good stuff has been written with simplistic means (McCarthy). The book is short, which made it possible for me to finish it.
Now, someone here is seriously wrong. Either it’s me or the Nobel committee. I don’t think it’s me.
Hi and forgive my intrusion on your blog, I accidentally found your posting after clicking on “Herta Muller” tag.
But I just wanted to say something about Herta Muller’s writings in general and about this novel in particular, a novel which I read a few years ago in Romanian (by the way, I think the title in Romanian describes the best what Herztier means: The animal of the heart) and recently in English as well (The Land of Green Plums is the title of the English edition).
As you’ve possibly realized, I am Romanian myself, but I didn’t come here to accuse you of misinterpretation or to defend Herta Muller based on some national pride – on the contrary, not only Herta Muller is German (even if she’s a German from Romania) but also a few years ago, when I first started reading her novels, she was barely mentioned among Romanian writers, she was just an expat who wrote very little in Romanian before she left the country.
However, I was simply shocked the first time I came in contact with her writings. I don’t think that anyone, Romanian or not, has ever described better what communism meant for the people who experienced it! Shocked both in a good way and a bad way – in a good way to see it depicted so sincerely and so accurately and shocked to understand the damage it has done to my country, I was only 9 when the regime fell, but I can still understand where she’s coming from. You mentioned Kafka, but you neglected the most important key to the novel, which is the precisely the absurd. I’m not saying it’s your fault, it’s just a second level of interpretation which is impossible to grasp by those who have not lived certain circumstances. You see, what Herta Muller does through all those details (and may I remind you the devil is in the details), through all that allusiveness which you don’t consider important, is to build at the second level of the novel a world in itself that has become meaningless, discontinuous, haphazard. Yet this particular world is the only one the characters know, their actions seem chaotic and bizarre, but that is normality to them.
For instance, you ask about the reasons the character is interrogated by the Securitate, yet you have so many right there in the book! It can be the fact that she read Lola’s notebook and Lola deceived the party, it might be that she and her friends read banned books in the summerhouse, it might be that they’re intellectuals and the regime in Romania disliked intellectuals especially groups of them (the Securitate followed any group of intellectuals, they considered them a threat to the party), it might be that poem they keep repeating, a poem by Gellu Naum, whose poetry was forbidden back then. It might be each and every one of these reasons! And why should she tell what they used to talk during those interrogations? It really didn’t matter! It was simply the fear that mattered! How can you describe in historical terms a background that made no sense to anyone? A country in which anything and anyone was abnormal, in which the innocent felt guilty and the guilty were convinced they’re doing good? So instead she relies on what she can actually describe, the only thing real to her and that is her inner sensations, feelings, images.
I was only 9 when the regime fell, but I can’t forget the fact that by the time I was 3 I already knew the fear, the double language, the fact that there were things I could talk to my family about, things I could talk to other kids in the neighborhood about, things I would never tell the neighbors (for instance the jokes about the regime my parents were saying in the evenings) and so on.
The problem with Herta Muller is that she is not easy to understand by those who don’t know this double language.
P.S. I understood you are Croatian and I love Danilo Kis myself. During those years when Herta Muller was oppressed everyone in the South Romania wanted to flee to Yugoslavia. Some made it, the majority didn’t. The people at the border on both parts of the Danube would shoot them, sometimes even for fun. Imagine that Yugoslavia meant freedom, meant the West for Romanians back then… and you’ll understand somehow where Herta Muller is coming from.
Dear Amanda, many thanks for your comment. But why begin with an apology? The whole idea of this blog is an exchange of opinions and, I may say, your comment is one of the most challenging so far.
Unfortunately, I don’t think we can pick up much of a fight here, since I agree with almost everything you said. I never tried to accuse the writer of not having the hard life experience she writes about, nor do I intend to claim that the Romanian was not a particularly vile manifestation of communism. I’ve read a little about it in the past, met a few people, and you saying that people wanted to flee to Yugoslavia (and being shot at while attempting to do so) really underlines the point.
Also, in the post I try to say how I believe that details are important in good writing. The terrible (and the suspenseful) are in the unsaid and in the alusive, doubtlessly.
However, you say that she builds “at the second level of the novel a world…” by using the allusive. This is where I have a problem. I don’t think she builds anything, because there is no first level. Details and the allusive are fine, if incorporated into a solid structure, but not by themselves. If one wants to write in allusive observations, one should write poems. For me, all she does is throw details around. You know, it’s some sort of modern approach to writing that doesn’t work for me at all. Sorry, but I really feel she’s a poor author.
Well, actually she can’t be that poor after receiving the Nobel prize money…
Anyway, to continue responding – the securitate interrogation episode was not a good example of her writing, I agree. What you said regarding this is entirely true.
In conclusion, you are right, I’m certainly not familiar with the double language you mention and that she might be referring to in the book. I can very well understand what you mean, but I wasn’t exposed to it and I can’t relate to it as much as a Romanian person can. Because of this (and other things of course) it seems you might have a special relation to her writing, which is completely understandable. Historically the topic she deals with is immensely important. To my knowledge, not many authors have tackled the topic of Romanian life under Ceauşescu. Or have they? You must know this better. Perhaps it’s her historical and political relevance that got her the prize.
For me, if the writer is “not easy to understand” he or she is almost always bad, with notable exceptions (e.g. Faulkner).
Hello again, I was apologizing because I landed on your blog purely by accident and what I was about to say contradicted your interpretation.
Anyways, getting back to Herta Muller, if there’s a flaw in this novel then it relies in the way she offers the reader the liberty to interpret the meanings behind the allusions and if the reader doesn’t have the right experience / instruments to do so then the reading in itself would fail. Pretty much like Milorad Pavic, but with much different means and for a different purpose.
Funny that you notice two things – you said that should be a poet and that you don’t know about many writers who have talked about the regime. Well, she did use to write poetry in her youth and I suppose there’s some type of difference between her German and the language spoken in Germany. She’s a Swab, a type of German population in Romania, and I think Swabs don’t speak the same as people from Germany – I don’t know much German, but there’s a clear difference, for instance, between the Hungarian spoken by the Hungarians in Transylvania (Romania) and the Hungarian from the mother country, also a huge gap between the Romanian they speak in Moldavia (the Republic of) and in Romania. So there might be a language barrier as well.
Or she might have explained some things a little more, for instance when it comes to those 3 characters you don’t like, Edgar, Georg and Kurt, she just says that they end up working in some awful cities but it doesn’t mention why – she doesn’t say anything about the fact the law was like that in Romania back then – people were given a job somewhere after they finished their studies and they were obliged to take them, regardless how far was the place or how terrible the conditions.
Also she could have given more details about her leaving to Germany – she left so easily because she was a Swab, if she was a Romanian she would have probably ended up in jail or even worse. But the Swabs were allowed to flee to Germany, I guess because they didn’t represent what the party needed which was a “new human being” pretty much like the Nazi ideal, but diluted behind communist speech.
I’ve read Kundera, Solzhenitsyn, even Makine with his allusive novels, but all of them have strong characters and tell a story. Instead communist Romania was a world almost impossible to depict of people who suspected each other, who feared each other, who betrayed each other and yet were forced to coexist. Everyone was thus an accomplice to something they sometimes didn’t even understand. The Securitate was everywhere, listening, blackmailing, interrogating, watching and it wasn’t their actions which were so malignant in the late ‘80s, but the fear in itself was suffocating. It was a country-sized prison, which somehow made everything uniform… that’s why those 3 guys in the novel are all the same, their names are just pretence for their existence: it doesn’t matter who is who, because the idea of personality was almost impossible to imagine in such circumstances.
It is the reason, I think, nobody actually had the guts to write too much on the subject.
Romanian writers in the ‘90s simply enjoyed their new freedom and forgot about any type of evil. They didn’t have, like their fellow in other former communist countries, hidden books in their drawers, ready to tell the story of the regime – simply because nobody had the courage to hide such writings back then. The only one who actually wrote about it in the true sense of the word was Herta Muller and that’s probably why she’s hasn’t been too much appreciated – she tells a story of a past everyone is eager to forget about. They don’t realize though the past is still in every one of them, that’s why I think her approach is probably the sanest of the two.
The double language I’ve been telling you about is certainly not easy to digest. Sometimes things are maybe a bit exaggerated. But it’s the only way to describe something so terrible that cannot be put very well into words, especially if you don’t want to judge anyone.
Herta Muller never judges, she just composes a reality behind the words which is more difficult to bear than a real sentence. And that’s why I think she got the prize right money or not
p.s. You are right about Le Clezio though
Hi Amanda. In any case your background information is excellent, and it certainly helps to appreciate the courage of what she was doing. Also – it is better for me and the blog, that people oppose me, so again, please don’t apologize.
I liked that you mentioned Kundera and Solzhenitsyn (I unfortunately did not read Makine). Stylistically, Kundera is probably the perfect guy to compare with Hertha Müller. He writes, as she does, in short simple sentences and he is the master of the allusive subtleties that make inter-personal relationships. If you have time have a look at what I wrote on Unbearable Lightness of Being some time ago. However, his writing is deeply rooted in a plot, characters, historical moment. Solzhenitsyn is also a great comparison to her, in political and historical terms. I’m personally not a fan of his writing, but his One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The First Circle are invaluable testaments, monuments to Stalinism, and when people come to read them in 100 years they will be able to see how this was. Imagine someone reading Hertha Müller in 100 years. Even now – imagine an American or Australian reading her book. How much would they understand? And surely one can’t say that Stalin was a more lenient ruler than Ceauşescu, and the Russians did not have their own fears, terror, insecurity, double-language…
The double-language issue is fine, and surely this is the reason you have additional access to her writing. But, don’t we all have our own “language,” with friends, with people who come from the same city or region as we do, with our professional group, family? Still, we should hot write in this language for the international audience, for the simple reason that we might not be understood. Sure, it’s cool to have a character speak a certain way, but the writer should ‘speak’ so that the reader understands. I don’t feel her German is the problem. It’s not dialectal, no fancy words, it’s pretty simple (which is good).
Being boring and being incomprehensible are two cardinal sins in writing.
I respect her mission and what she (and you, your parents and Romanian people) have been through, but I’m trying to write about writing in this blog, and this is where she fails, in my view.
Thank you immensely for your comments! And for agreeing about Le Clézio…
Actually I did read your article about Kundera the first time I came on your blog, it’s one of the reasons I replied to you… I usually only comment the blogs I like
And it’s a good comparison, I fully agree with your observations about Kundera and Solzhenitsyn. I actually think Kundera himself would have been a very good choice for the prize, but I guess that debate about him being an informant of the communist regime prevented him from getting it.
And yes, I think in a 100 years from now, or even sooner, there will be less and less people to fully understand Herta Muller’s novels. Yet, I believe those who will be open enough to see her work as it is – a metaphor of the absurd and of the confinement – will still be able to read her.
Well, seems we reached a consensus here. Thanks a lot for the comments and for the compliment. I’m sorry I’m unable to read your site. Lovely language though…
This review really helped me examine the reasons I disliked The Land of Green Plums. I think your comments were spot-on, particularly your observation that much of the detail Mueller inserts into her narrative feels incomprehensible and irrelevant to the reader. I also experienced the physical revulsion you mentioned while reading some passages. I’m glad to see that others have shared that experience! I was beginning to think something was wrong with me…
But there is one minor issue I had with your review, really just a matter of taste. Sometimes, your criticism of Mueller’s writing seems to skirt the territory of an ad hominem attack.
After comparing Mueller’s background to Kafka’s, you snidely apologize for “mentioning these two people in the same sentence,” and while discussing Mueller’s credentials as an author, you seem unconvinced that she ever really became “a successful writer.” And while it’s fine to disagree with the stylistic approach of an author, purporting that the whole book is simply “random [things] some woman is saying to make herself interesting and insightful” comes off as a little too virulent. These elements of your post were somewhat off-putting for me, and if you hadn’t also provided such a solid analytical foundation for your review with your analysis of Mueller’s style and structure, I probably wouldn’t have taken you seriously.
But like I said, overall a fantastic analysis.
Hi Mikhail, I’m glad you thought the same way. I can never help wondering when a clearly average writer receives publicity and important awards. Have a look at what I wrote earlier about Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. Similar situation – appalling writing and she won the Booker, plus a lot of money for the manuscript.
There’s nothing I can say to my defense – I stand guilty as charged. I have no business writing badly about Hertha Müller, especially because I know nothing about her. Perhaps one thing could exculpate me a little: I felt strongly bothered while reading her, and that revulsion combined with the fact she won the Nobel made me overdo what I set out to write in the first place. I’m aware it’s immature and, if these were reviews for a ‘serious’ journal or a ‘serious’ webpage, I’d certainly be more careful and revise my texts way more. But you are right, even here I should behave. To make such comments about someone in public is childish. I guess I have to get used to the fact that someone is actually reading the posts on the blog.
Thanks!
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As an American reader, I had no problem connecting with this book and found it beautifully written, so I have to disagree with you. I, too, read it in the original German. The first two or three page were confusing and surprising, the style was so different it almost made me doubt my grasp on the language, and I think that is what Herta Müller meant with this. The human mind is such a whirl of confusion, all vaguely connecting little pieces of past and present and future. The observations of the narrator all tie into the little snippets of childhood in some way. The point of the book is that we know nothing an everything. We see no personality in anything, except what the narrator sees. And that is very little. We don’t get the depth, not on the surface. We get little bits and pieces of life tied together, life seen through the eyes of a person whose own mind is a mess, and they make the big picture. It’s not supposed to always make sense. You’re not supposed to like the characters; you hardly get to know them. The narrator keeps a distance from people and tries never to know too much about them, as with Tereza. She doesn’t want to know and understand Tereza and so tries to look at Tereza’s body in segments. The poem is a perfect example of this sentiment.
Jeder hatte einen Freund in jedem Stückchen Wolke
So ist es halt mit Freunden wo die Welt voll Schrecken ist
Auch meine Mutter sagte das ist ganz normal
Freunde kommen nicht in Frage
Denk an seriösere Dinge
Everyone has friends and relationships, but they are shallow. Friends don’t think too much about their friends. They don’t know much about them. Everyone are in hiding in their own skin, which is why we get such a skewed view of people. No one wants to be personal and get in trouble. There are more important things to worry about than the relationships and personality, like survival.
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