Review by Choice Review
In the last third of the 20th century, German literature has been enriched by an influx of immigrants who have turned to writing to communicate anxieties, fears, and discomforts. Many of them have struggled to make the German language their literary idiom, with a degree of success. M"uller arrived in West Germany in 1987, having escaped Ceau,sescu's Romania, and soon turned to fictionalizing her experiences. This is one of her most compelling and riveting tales, particularly for audiences just starting to appreciate pre-Glasnost life. Her style is intentionally stark. Short sentences, juxtaposition of unusual images and ideas, and language verging on the poetic make this work dense yet flowing. Hofmann's outstanding translation preserves M"uller's terse, poetic feel but avoids stiffness and stuffiness. The story presents the lives of a group of university students from provincial villages, who come to the city and discover that life there is in many ways as bleak and terrifying as it was in the hinterlands. Those seeking freedom of expression and thought are branded enemies of the state and must perish, even if by suicide. The only viable options are to succumb to the will of the state or emigrate, which few can do. This work transcends its own culture. All collections. C. L. Dolmetsch; Marshall University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Two unique and courageous novels, one set in Argentina, the other Romania, that depict young women coming of age under totalitarianism. In 1975, Sara, the heroine of Kozameh's brief novel, was arrested; she remained a political prisoner for more than three years. Sara's well-drawn prison life, full of brutalities as well as comforts from her companeras, is the centerpiece of the book. At the same time, Sara's life after prison, when she is nightmarishly unable to assume anything resembling a normal life, is the most affecting. No doubt painful to write, this autobiographical novel would have been improved by more context; more of Sara's life, especially before her arrest, would have lent the book greater historical depth. Sent to school in the city, the nameless narrator of Muller's novel falls in with a group of three young men. Repressed by Ceausescu's police state, they're capable of only a sort of mild political rebelliousness that expresses itself more as a state of mind than through action. The narrative follows this quartet from school to early adulthood, when the government places them in dreary jobs throughout the country, and they are forced to communicate by coded letters. Boredom, deprivation, continual governmental harassment and betrayal by friends slowly destroy these young people. By the novel's end, hope is gone, and suicide becomes either a welcome fantasy, as in the case of our narrator, or a solution, as it is for several of her friends. Recipient of Germany's most prestigious literary award, the Kelist Prize, Muller has written a novel of despair in a prose that glistens, creating vivid images to document a monochromatic world. --Brian Kenney
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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 narratora young woman studying to become a translatormeets 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, Müller 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. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this new novel by the Romanian-born Müller, 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 Müller, 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. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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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