The Land of Green Plums

by Herta Müller, Michael Hofmann (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312429942
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	11/23/2010
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Herta Müller is the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the European Literature Prize. She is the author of, among other books, The Hunger Angel and The Land of Green Plums. Born in Romania in 1953, Müller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceausescu's secret police. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin.

Michael Hofmann is a poet and frequent contributor to The New York Times Book Review, and is widely regarded as one of the world's foremost translators of works from German to English. His original poetry collections include One Lark, One Horse and Where Have You Been? He has translated Willy Peter Reese's A Stranger to Myself, Joseph Roth's The Tale of the 1002nd Night, Herta Muller's The Land of the Green Plums, and Gottfried Benn's Impromptus. Hofman lives in London.

Editorial Reviews

Unflinching. . . Ms. Müller's vision of a police state manned by plum thieves reads like a kind of fairy tale on the mingled evils of gluttony, stupidity and brutality.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Müller has triumphed in her honesty, and The Land of Green Plums is her testimony. . . .Describes in precisely hewn detail what is was like to live in Romania under communism.” —The Washington Post

“Ms. Müller's rich, harsh, obsessive imagery captures the surreal beauty and the difficulty of Ceausescu-era Romania.” —The Boston Book Review

“This heartbreaking tale is bitter and dark, yet beautiful. . . Stark and telling.” —San Diego Union-Tribune

“The Land of Green Plums works hauntingly, disturbingly well.” —The Guardian (UK)

“Impressive, wholly authentic. . . a bleak fable with the flickering intensity of a nightmare.” —International Herald Tribune

“This is a novel of strong, spare poetry in translation. Again and again, its speech startles. Then it quickly sounds just right, and it becomes hard to imagine there might not have been a Herta Müller to transcribe these urgent whispers.” —The Australian

“By paying careful attention to the slightest nuances of life in Romania the book gives an accurate description of what it was like to be alive anywhere in Eastern Europe during the years of communism. . . Müller has triumphed in her honesty and The Land of Green Plums is her testimony.” —The Washington Times

From the Publisher

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

Larry Wolff

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.

Kirkus Reviews