The Land of Green Plums

Romania has probably never been my idea of Paradise -- not when it was the outermost corner of the Roman Empire, not in the millennia since, not even today -- but it was surely closer to Hell on Earth during the phony-communist tyranny of Ceauçescu than ever before. Nevertheless, though 'everyone' around them was obsessed with fleeing at any risk, the four young dissidents of this novel were painfully ambiguous about exiling themselves. As it turned out, the first of them to flee wouldn't last long in Germany anyway. But given how vile and perilous life was for them in Romania, as described anyway, one HAS to ask what held them so tenaciously. Family? Yet their families were hateful. Idealism? Long shed! Fear of otherness? Well, yes, that for sure... The narrator is a young woman from a German-Romanian village, whose father had been an SS officer. Sent to the city for education and to make something of herself, she hooks up to three young men whose situations are similar. The narrator also forms tortured relationships with two women of her own age, a fellow student who commits suicide and the alienated daughter of a Party official of some importance. Is the narrator Herta Müller herself? Yes, of course, and no, of course not. The subject matter of Müller's novels is always the paranoic nightmare of life under the Dictatorship, with its interrogations, its betrayals, its abject corruption of all aspects of personality, but each novel tells a somewhat different story. As a reader, this time, I choose to think that "The Land of Green Plums" is a carefully crafted fiction, whatever details it may include from Müller's own experiences. It's all the more amazing that way. The poetic vividness of the narrator's memories need not be compromised by fact-checking. Vivid they are! Heart-rackingly personal, full of jagged coded symbolism, a whole interiorized secret language, in which 'fingernail clippers' mean 'interrogation' and 'blood drinking' stands for collaboration with the tyranny. This language is not always easily deciphered. It's fragmented and elusive, and any usual chronological constraints of narration do not apply. The narrator is simultaneously a village girl, a student, a woman the 'authorities' want to hound out of existence, and a atomized non-person-in-exile. What a powerful emotional tool Müller's cryptic coded language is, nevertheless! If anguish can ever be beautiful, Müller makes it so. Her originality and imagination are dazzling. I chose to read this book, Müller's best known, in English because of the respect I have for the skill of translator Michael Hofmann. Having read it once that way, I certainly plan to read it again in German. It's good enough for the effort. The German title, by the way, has nothing to do with plums; it's "Herztier", a made-up word meaning literally 'heart-beast'. The English translation is possibly misleading; "The Land of Green Plums" might suggest an aura of nostalgia or romanticism that doesn't fit t

My five-star rating has little to do with liking this book, or even understanding it. But it kept me reading with nightmare fascination. Herta Müller's recent Nobel Prize aside, this is clearly a major statement, whether as an historical document, a work of art, or the depiction from the inside of a mind fragmented by fear and the oppression of a totalitarian regime. For Müller, born to a German family in Romania, lived her young adult life under the repression of the Ceausescu state security apparatus, finally escaping to Germany in 1987 at the age of 34. Like fragments from a psychiatrist's couch that painfully piece themselves together into a coherent story, this is a scrapbook of spiritual debris, the record of a mind almost pulverized by pressure, that somehow managed to regain its sanity. The book begins in a series of surreal images: "A child refuses to let her nails be cut. This hurts, says the child. The mother ties the child to a chair with the belts from her dresses. [...] The child knows: the mother in her tightly-tied love is going to cut up my hands. Then she'll have to stick the cut-up fingers in the pocket of her housedress and go into the courtyard, as if she meant to throw them away. And in the yard, where no one can see her, she'll have to eat the child's fingers." This symbolic torture stands in for real torture, of which there is remarkably little in the book; the worst the state can do is reserved for the mind, not the body. Working more like poetry than prose, Müller's fragments swirl obsessively around a number of images: the evil green plums of the title, mulberries, animal blood, red-shanked sheep, dried cows' tails, nuts, river stones, nail-clippers, barbers, dentists, underwear, whisper-thin nylons with runs in them, snatches of song, strands of hair, physical disease, and an animal life-force constantly threatening to turn against its host. The latter entity, here translated as "heart-beast," gives the book its original German title, HERZTIER. Although the recurrent images become, if anything, even more obsessive throughout the book, it gradually edges into some kind of narrative focus. It seems to begin in the author's college days, when she is living with other girls in one dormitory while maintaining a cautious friendship with three men in another. Already they are under suspicion, whether as outsiders (all four are members of the German-speaking minority in Romania) or just by being intellectuals, and all are called in from time to time for interrogation. Nevertheless, all four graduate and are moved to stultifying jobs out of the city. But the atmosphere of fear only tightens, leading them all to compromise each other and, even worse, themselves. All eventually lose their posts, and most leave the country, as the author did herself. Though these emigrations seem surprisingly easy, they are no escape; the state has a wide reach. People mysteriously disappear in transit. Even in Germany, emigrés may receive death

Four students, Edward, Georg, Kurt and "I", the narrator, develop a close friendship in the aftermath of the alleged suicide of Lola. She had shared a room at the student dorm with the narrator and four other girls. Lola came from the south of the country and was in many ways different from the majority of students. "I", the other outsider among the girls, was entrusted with Lola's diary, and tried to hide it in her suitcase. However, there were no safe places for secrets anymore; suspicion and intrigue was palpable. The friendship of the four young people was in part born out their lives' otherness: they were members of Banat-Svabian (German) minority in Romania; their fathers had been SS officers, their mothers were eking out a living as seamstresses in different small communities away from the university town. They feel connected through their language and different upbringing. Speaking through the narrator, Herta Müller weaves an extraordinarily rich and haunting portrait of daily life under the totalitarian Ceausescu regime of the 1980s. Exemplifying the novel's central theme - to bear witness to the open and hidden horrors - the author depicts the individual experiences of the four central characters and their interactions as they are increasingly caught in the net of the security police and its ever observant helpers. After leaving town, being sent to different work places, they invent a special undercover language or terminology to communicate by letter... "HERZTIER" (1993) -published in 1996 under the English title "The Land of Green Plums" - transcends the usual definition of a 'novel': it has been called a "prose poem" by some commentators. For me, having read it in its German original, a definition as 'poem' does not really capture the book's essence, despite its often poetic language. I don't know of any other text quite like it. Applying a deliberately simple structure: short paragraphs, short sentences, extensive indirect dialog, often introduced by 'he said', she 'said', Müller's language is nevertheless highly complex. Even without any interactive dialog, the narrative is vivid and, once the reader is used to Müller's approach, it flows despite there being no coherent plot and the reader has to keep abreast through many jumps in timelines and scenarios. Some sections are even funny in their own somewhat macabre way, such as Captain Pjele and his dog with the same name. The reader senses different layers to the text - the straightforward surface structure of the narrator's reminiscences is in fact hiding a extraordinarily refined and evocative range of images and metaphors. One feels tempted to go back and reread sections. Fast readers be warned: this is a book that requires slow reading, with pauses for reflection. At times Müller uses her own or local terminology. The German title, Herztier, for example, does not exist as a term, it is a composite of 'heart' and 'animal'. The author gives subtle hints as to its significance:

this book is about some youngsters' dream of life and their disappointment. especially about friendship, the book gives us a harsh reality of what it is to grow up. those friends who experienced tragic death of their common friend, find it almost impossible to be free from the frustration after all. they are not only haunted by the intruding force of authority but also by their own past. the stories of their families are just too forceful. also, i think the narrative style which is tossed by thoses quotes (he said, she said, ... said, etc.) not to mention, through those letters written by various characters, is fantastic. i can imagine, in original german language, it would be a lot better to be read, with the reportage-like nuance of verb endings of indirect quotation.very eccentric and exciting novel!

Be prepared to be surprised. You probably havent read anything like this before. It is very interestingly written, more like a poetry. But its not a book for everyone, its not an easy reading, where you can send your mind somewhere else. You have to be there completely. All your senses, emotions etc. This is like The Little Prince - but for adults. Herta Muller is telling us a story about living under dictatorship, halfman, halfanimal being, trying to forget about all the hopes and desires we share as humans forming a society. If you reach for the beauty, difference or something simple as love, you are condemned. Not all of us have experienced communism in this way (I am a bit too young), but this is a personal declaration about violation of human rights, being stabbed in the back, betrayed, left alone, dissapointed. Sadly, many of the things, described in this book, are true events. The book fokuses on the group of friends, that have met each other attending university. They soon reach and cross the boundaries of allowed thinking... But dont just give up if you think this is just too sad to read! It offers you a great thinking material you shouldnt avoid! It opens your horizons, sharpens your emotions. Even if you are a rock - do prepare a handkerchief for a tear or two. A book you can give to someone special in your life as a symbol of your friendship.