Translated by Kate McNaughton
Review by Karen Langley
Nobel-prize winner Herta Muller is a Romanian-German novelist, poet and essayist who’s known for work which captures the experience of living under a totalitarian regime. Growing up as a German speaker in the Swabian area of Romanian Banat, her homeland was something of a contested area and her life experience reflects that. When Muller was awarded the Novel in 2009, it was noted that she was a writer “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed”. Muller’s new book explores, via the medium of interviews, the author’s life and work and it makes for fascinating reading.
Village is drawn from conversations between Muller and her editor, Angelika Klammer; the bulk of these took place in December 2013/January 2014, with additional passages focusing on her book The Hunger Angel taken from an earlier conversation in August 2009. The result is a book which interrogates Muller’s past and the effect it had on her work, and the opening pages are striking.
Muller grew up in a Socialist world, and the first image is the ‘huge Socialist cornfields’ of her childhood. Her experience of living in a village is not idyllic; she recalls nature as being “physical harassment” and the bleak setting was matched by her family background. Muller’s father had been in the SS during WW2; her mother had spent five years in a Soviet Labour Camp; and Muller was born three years after that parent’s return. From the events the author recalls here, her mother was deeply marked by the experience, and Muller’s childhood was full of cruelty.
Life was not easy in any Soviet satellite, and Muller struggled after leaving her studies, eventually finding work in an engineering factory as a translator. Here, she was under the eye of the Secret Service, the Securitate, and was at one point forced to do her work on a staircase as she was thrown out of her office. By this time, she was part of a group agitating for free speech and it’s clear from the narrative of this book that she spent much of her life under observation, constantly being called for interrogations. Fortunately, a friend called Jenny helped her, but it’s clear that survival was a struggle.
After leaving the factory, Muller made a living by teaching and translating for a while, before her first book was published in 1982. There is quite a lot of exploration of Muller’s work in Village, and that first book, Nadirs, was a collection of short stories very much drawn from her own young life. Her work won awards, yet she was rarely allowed to leave her country while the regime was in power, and it was not until some time after its fall that she was eventually able to gain access to the file they had held on her. As she reveals in the interviews, her highly regarded The Hunger Angel drew on not only her mother’s experiences in the Labour Camp, but also those of her friend Oskar Pastior.
The impact of Muller’s thoughts and recollections is powerful; the total control exercised by the regime, the inability to trust anyone, the constant harassment and interrogations by the Securitate all combine to wear a person down, and as Muller reveals, not all of her friends survived. Most poignant, perhaps is Jenny; Muller returns to their relationship at several points in the book, relating their friendship over the years and revealing how despite having little in common they became very close. Yet there were always suspicions, as Jenny’s father was high up in the Communist Party, and so Muller was forced to keep her apart from other friends. Tragically, Jenny died young, but during their last meeting there came a betrayal which obviously marked Muller deeply.
What runs through this book is courage; the strength it takes to survive under this kind of regime can’t be underestimated. As Muller reveals, even when she was able to leave Romania for Germany she was still under threat, well aware that agents of the Secret Service could track her down in any country. There are also themes of hunger; whether for the plants around her in the village, or for the words she turns into her books, she has a constant appetite and this motif returns again and again. Intriguingly, in the final section, she reveals that she’s constantly cutting up words for collage, another artistic string to her bow – words are always her fodder.
It has to be said that this book reads nothing like a straight transcription of a bland interview, as Muller’s words are atmospheric, evocative and beautiful. She captures the landscape of her past, the lost world she lived in and the motivation of her work wonderfully, and you end the book with your head buzzing with ideas. It’s more like a crafted memoir, and all the better for it. I suspect if you were a person who’d read Muller’s work then Village would be even more meaningful, but as someone who hasn’t yet, I still found it mesmerising and compelling. A powerful book, giving an insight into life under a repressive regime, and a fascinating read.
Karen Langley blogs at kaggsysbookishramblings and has no time for dictators. (www.kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com)
Herta Muller, The Village on the Edge of the World: Writing and Surviving Ceaușescu’s Romania (Granta Books, 2026). 978-1783788170. 256pp., paperback.
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