The Appointment

The main character of this novel is summoned to an interrogation by the Romanian secret police for the crime of `prostitution in the workplace'. She had stitched her name and address in garments ready for export to Italy. In the tramway which takes her to the interrogation office, she recalls the main events in her life: marriage, infidelities, brief encounters, professional traveling, sexual harassment, the alcoholism of her partner or the continuous monitoring of her private life. In a melancholic tone and progressing by association, Herta Müller masterfully evokes a demoralized society ('the indifference with which I would have liked to have died down there, I who loved so devilishly life '), dominated by a corrupt bureaucracy ('perfumed communists') and plagued by alcoholism and suspicion (there are spies everywhere). In short, a dictatorship, a prison. The only way to escape these hopeless living conditions is emigration at all costs to a free country. The story exposes a system that has paralyzed an entire population in order to consolidate the power of a tiny minority of former revolutionaries, who became cynic tyrants. Highly recommended to all lovers of world literature.

The Appointment illustrates once more why Herta Muller is a European writer to be reckoned with. She has, without question, a keen eye and a no-holds-bar understanding of the deadening power that Communism has when it infiltrates into the public consciousness and then rushes down, like a waterfall, into the proceeding generations, for the people must die onto themselves (or at least be helped in that direction) in order to make the government/regime more booming and powerful. The citizens then become shadows of their former selves, and the sweeping negativity becomes a black pall that is draped like a wet blanket. The story revolves around a nameless female who works in a clothing factory; she sews clothes together and is, in essence, a cog in the Communist regime. Yet, there is a spirited sense of defiance in her make-up. She sews notes into the fabric of the clothing (headed for Italy), notes containing written marriage proposals and the like, an illegal act by any stretch of the socialist imagination. It becomes captured evidence that the Securitate (Ceausescu's secret police) now possess, and with that, they hound her relentlessly, imbuing into her already delicate but fluctuating sense of sanity, doubt and fear. She is trying to prevent the crumbling of her self by conveying a sense of intellectual aloofness and caustic hardness. But her shield of armor is being penetrated. The arrows going through her are not just the repetitious appointments with not-so veiled threats but also the people she encounters on the tram to get to those vile and personally intrusive meetings. The passengers on the tram wear the effects of Communism like one would a form fitting article of clothing. Needless to say, they are a miserable lot of individuals, and the nameless protagonist is working very hard to not fall into their camp, not desiring one iota to become one of them, those people. But as the tram sways and turns with each passing movement, the nameless factory worker is lulled into a series of flashbacks that convey her whole life in a frame of trapped Communist gloominess, most evocative in her first marriage. However, her second marriage (like a second chance in life) is no better. The flashbacks are an additive to the tale, capturing the past which is no better that the present. And that is represented best by Major Albu, the inquisitor who hammers her on and on until she tells him-if only sometimes- what she thinks he wants to hear. But the mind numbing harping evokes thoughts and images of this nature: "Each shoreline was marked by wooden crosses set in the rocks, bearing the dates on which people had drowned. Cemeteries underwater and crosses all around-portents of dangerous times to come. As if all those round lakes were hungary and needed their yearly ration of meat delivered on the dates inscribed. Here no one dived for the dead: the water would snuff out life in an instant, chilling you to the bone in a matter of seconds." Page 17. Sexual

The Twentieth Century, Herta Müller's and mine! I lived through more of it than she did, but she lived closer to 'ground zero' of social agony. Born in 1953, in Ceaucescu's nightmare police state, she escaped by self-exile to Germany in 1987. Her novels, as many as I've looked at, portray the claustrophobic anxiety of life in the 20th C more excruciatingly than any since Kafka's. I'm somewhat startled to discover that translations of her work into English have been available for at least eleven years, but American readers have utterly ignored her until she received the 2009 Nobel Prize. This time, I'm willing to shout, the Nobel went to the right person. But back to the 20th Century: colonialist exploitation, Jim Crow lynchings and apartheid, the bloodbath of the Great War, genocide everywhere, fascism/nazism, the gulags, millions of refugees, death camps and dead-end camps, religious fanaticism and the consequences thereof, the Atomic Bomb... and that list doesn't include the spiritual/psychological malaise of anomie amidst throngs. Oh yeah, before the 20th C, life was universally "nasty, brutish, and short." Well, even discounting the decrease in child mortality, life has gotten statistically longer... but it's kept up, alas, in nastiness and brutishness. Want evidence? Read our literature, the novels, stories, poems, and plays we have prepared to bequeath to readers of the 22nd C and beyond. Does the literature of any other century match ours for anguish? For loneliness, depression, frustration, and fear? Not even close! We've mourned our lives so poignantly that our descendants will wonder why we bothered to persist. Honestly, I've been mostly an observer of the century's misery. Not a bad life, I've had. So I'm prepared to be grateful to Herta Müller for sharing her torment with me. This novel, titled "Today I'd Rather Not Meet Myself" in German (Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet) but translated as "The Appointment" in English, is scarcely cheerful or diverting to read. The narrator, a youngish Romanian factory worker, has been summoned for another round of vicious interrogation by the police, concerning her wish to flee the country. As she prepares her mind for the interrogation while riding the bus, she tells the story of her own life and the lives of others in her world. Her narration is NOT in the style of so-called "stream of consciousness". It's quite simple and straight-forward, as easy to follow as an edited oral history. Reviewers who complain that this novel is 'difficult' must have avoided most of the classics of 20th C fiction. The narration is not written in simulation of the thoughts of an unsophisticated 'prol'. Müller is too honest for that game. It would be hard to doubt that Müller is portraying herself, her own dire anguish in her own disastrous homeland. Müller writes with lapidary attention to details. Her sentences are beautifully shaped and timed. Her images are stunningly precise and original. In other words,

Muller's The Appointment is more of an experience than a novel. I say that because it has no discernable plot, vague characters, and not the faintest story arc for the reader to track. Instead it is a intelligently-written telling of the thought processes one woman experiences while on the way to an appointment with a tyrannical man who enjoys occasionally browbeating her over the notes she slips in coats at her garment factory, simply saying "Marry Me" with her name and address. The protagonist dreads these meetings, and her mind is already heightened by anxiety and despair. Despair pervades every page of the book, but Muller is a very talented author, and even in the darkest scenes there is presence and a very dry string of humor. As the protagonist's day progresses, and the memories turn more and more enigmatic, the reader is given a simplistic view of life in an oppressive society, where a walnut can bring you joy and alcoholism is excused as a given. It is a testament to Muller's skill that the book is strange yet never dull, with a keen sensitivity throughout. Recommended for any fan of European or challenging literature.

Well, I might be in a minority here, but I truly enjoyed the book. True, it didn't follow a strict linear format, but then, neither did the protagonist's life ... I thought this one was more clear than her previous book, "The Land of Green Plums." Recommended.