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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.… (more)
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The narrator of the story is one of the members, and the only female in the group. When one of her roommates, Lola, is found dead in the closet, the narrator takes and hides Lola's diary so that it won't be found by the political police. Shaken by guilt at not being a better friend and frightened by the subsequent searches of her room, the narrator tells her cohort members, and they work out a system to warn each other when they have been searched, followed, or taken in for questioning by the enigmatic Captain Pjele.
The pressure and tension does not relent once the four are out of school and working in unfulfilling jobs. The political police threaten their families, deny them their vocations, and increase the physical threats. The only way to live seems to be to flee the country, although few hold out any hope at all of escaping and have seen the evidence of failed escapes, or to commit suicide. In a world where neither the countryside nor the city provides safety and relationships are overshadowed by the constant fear of betrayal, people live shadow lives. In the end, each of the four must decide how they are going to continue and face the consequences of their choices.
Herta Müller, like her characters, suffered a double persecution in communist Romania under Ceauşescu. First, as an intellectual, a young person who left her provincial village to seek education and a modicum of freedom in the city; and second, as a member of the Banat Swabians, a German-speaking minority group. The characters and plot of the novel are based on these two tensions: life in a totalitarian state and life as a minority. But the characters are not well-developed, and the plot is confusing at times. Instead of focusing on the concrete (such as setting in story in time and place), the author focuses on the sensations and appetites of the characters, their distrust yet dependence on one another, and the bleak numbness of spirit which corrodes and corrupts insidiously. Müller is a poet, and the hopeless landscape of the mind when faced with such a regime is the focus of her word pictures and metaphors. The result is less a story of individuals, despite at least one of the characters being a person from Müller's own youth, than a collage of flat emotions and colorless landscapes.
This is the second of Müller's books which I've read, the first being Hunger Angel. Although I can appreciate both the author's experiences which are reflected in the pages and the fictitious stories, the emotional emptiness of the books carries over into my connection with them. I'm glad I delved into this Nobel Laureate's world for a time, but I'm not sure I will return.
Herta Muller's third novel tells the story of a group of young university students living in Ceausescu's Romania. One of the young women, Lola, has violent sexual encounters with men in semi-public places, and we are left to guess why. To keep party officials satisfied? For food? Pure sublimation? She ends up dead one day - found hanging in her closet - under circumstances every bit as mysterious. Everyone's lives are full of paranoia, angst, and fear of being turned into the state officials, who filter into and out of the characters' lives in both latent and manifest forms. Unlike her friend who committed suicide (or was she killed?), the narrator of the novel decides to emigrate to Germany to face an uncertain future.
I must admit that I had a very difficult time with this novel, but not in the normal ways: it wasn't difficult to read, or difficult to understand in historical context. It simply offered nothing new for me. The story, the tale of the lives of a young woman and a few of her male friends seemed, with all of its verisimilitude, straight out of history. Anyone that has read about Romania under Ceausescu knows about his cult of personality, the utter deprivation that his people constantly lived under, and surviving only to think possibly of one day being "disappeared." The lives of Lola, Edgar, Georg, and Kurt are not unfamiliar to history.
The lessons this book teaches are the lessons of history, not of literature. I have a small amount of familiarity, gained solely through reading, about that time and place. In those books, I read of people like the major characters presented in the book. But at least for me, Muller's novel presents no added value to the history I already know. Great fiction has to be more than "litterature verite." It needs to bring something to the table that history cannot, something that speaks to the human condition differently than a historian does. Muller's writing lacked this, at least for me.
Michael Hofmann's translation is poetic, meditative, disjointed, which I found appropriate for the tone and subject matter of Muller's novel. I look forward to reading more of Muller's work in the future, and hope to appreciate it more than I did "The Land of Green Plums."
It took me a while to get into the writing, and I'm not sure if it's because of the translations or if the original wasn't written as smoothly either. Some phrases were repeated, and I'm sure there must have been some symbolism behind the oft repeated mention of the green plums which lend themselves to the title, but apart from signifying greed, I couldn't see what else they could have been referring to.
If you're into stark and depressing dystopian stories, this will be right up your alley.
"The gym instructor was the first to raise his hand. All the other hands flew up after his. While raising their hands, everybody looked up at the raised hands of the others. If
"It was so quiet among the hands, someone said inside the cube, that you could hear the breathing up and down the wooden benches. And it stayed that quiet until the gym instructor laid his arm across the lectern and said: There's no need to count, of course we're all in favor."
I like this book for the picture it gives of that era, which is of interest to me.
I don't like it because it's just so strange. Great writing, perhaps, but not the sort of writing that my brain processes very well.
Such heavy symbolism permeates the entire text of
Yet these strained symbols and double-speak also indicate the means of resistance by the four. Their actions and subterfuge often appear less about not being noticed and more about testing exactly the boundaries of the enforcement officer keeping an eye on them - resistance that undercuts the state's regime by simply not playing along. The book opens with this line: "When we don't speak, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves." Both the characters and the novel itself split the difference by veiled political references that only stand to goad the regime, rather than overtly call it out. The subtlety of irony is lost within totalitarian thought, yet such subterfuge becomes a valuable literary tool for countering the same unyielding political force.
The unnamed female narrator paints a picture of life in Romania under a dictatorship. The narrator and three male friends, all college students from provincial villages, come under surveillance for an unspecified reason. The four are aware that they're being watched, and their fear and paranoia increase with the passage of months and years as they await their uncertain future. Their friendship disintegrates as the few freedoms they have are gradually taken away from them.
This wasn't an easy read. The author uses a lot of symbolism, and I'm sure I missed plenty of it. It probably didn't help that I was reading the English translation, my only option since I don't speak German. I suspect that this was a difficult book to translate because of the nature of the book. Language seems to be an important aspect of the book, and the author most likely used words for a specific purpose for which there isn't an exact English equivalent. More experienced readers of this kind of fiction will be able to appreciate this novel more than I did, particularly if they're able to read it in its original German.
Müller is a Nobel Prize winning author, and despite my slight disconnect with the book, I still highly recommend. It has vivid imagery that I won't forget and began to open up my eyes to a historical era that I know little about.
Müller describes the living conditions, “A little cube of a room, one window, six girls, six beds, under each a suitcase. Next to the door, a closet built into the wall; in the ceiling over the door, a loudspeaker. The workers’ choruses sang from the ceiling to the wall, from the wall to the beds, until night fell. Then they grew quiet, like the street below the window and the scruffy park, which no one walked through anymore. There were forty identical cubes in each dormitory” (4-5). Müller’s style perfectly conveys the oppressive conditions forced upon these students by the regime.
The characters all leave strands of hair on their suitcases and in their books, so they know when – not if – the secret police have searched the room. The four friends develop elaborate plans to hide their journals, which include rants against the regime and – the most threatening writings of all – poetry.
I often hear the words tyrant, dictator, oppressor, secret police tossed around like bread crumbs in a yard full of birds, but I find it hard to understand how people live and die under such brutal governments. Reading Müller’s work has opened a window for me on the realities many millions struggle under every day. This novel made me more aware of the freedoms we enjoy. I won’t take them for granted. Yet, even in a free society, we see encroachments from all sorts of individuals and government agencies. Facebook and Twitter have opened the books of our lives for anyone with a computer to dig through. And we do this freely and willingly, and even with a nonchalance that sometimes disturbs me.
While discussing communication among the four friends, Müller writes,
“‘When you write, don’t forget to put the date, and always put a hair with the letter,’ said Edgar. ‘If there isn’t one, we’ll know the letter’s been opened.’” // Single hairs, I thought to myself, crisscrossing the country on trains. A dark hair of Edgar’s, a light one of mine. A red one of Kurt or of Georg. They were both called Goldilocks by the students. “‘The word nail-clipper in a sentence will mean interrogation,’ said Kurt, ‘shoes will mean a search, a sentence about having a cold will mean you’re being followed. After the greeting always an exclamation point, but a comma if your life’s in danger’ (81).
This tense style really gave me the willies. Herta Müller’s The Land of Green Plums will stir up the imagination and make the reader knit the brow attempting to understand what can make a regime descend into this pit of hell dragging its citizens down with it. 5 stars
--Jim, 6/26/13
** Whatever you carry out of your province,
** When we don’t speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.
Muller delineates the story of barren lands, mournful eyes, optimistic hearts and spirited beliefs perishing into nothingness wondering how the sky would look from the cold depths of a grave.
** Whatever you carry out of your province,
** When we don’t speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.
Muller delineates the story of barren lands, mournful eyes, optimistic hearts and spirited beliefs perishing into nothingness wondering how the sky would look from the cold depths of a grave.
** Whatever you carry out of your province,
** When we don’t speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.
Muller delineates the story of barren lands, mournful eyes, optimistic hearts and spirited beliefs perishing into nothingness wondering how the sky would look from the cold depths of a grave.
Unlike Nadirs, this takes place not in the village but the city. While I read the book, I went and looked at pictures of Bucharest, once called the "Paris of the East". It is indeed a beautiful city. Very little of that is evident either in the dialogue or scenes painted by Müller. There is a harsh reality that forms the background for the lives of four friends that are depicted in the novel. Educated, all from out-lying villages, idealistic (although limited by circumstance) and cheerful, these young people are quickly beaten down by the system that limits their future and minutely examines their present.
Although there is a plot, life and death, victory and defeat, it is not really the point. The devil or the delight, depending on your point of view, is in the details. Village and city life share a grimy and filthy frame. The violence of life is close at hand - and I am not speaking of street violence, but the violence of the slaughterhouse, or of mothers to daughters, and elites to peasants. This is what life is made up in the Romania of Müller.
Time exists in a malleable way in this book. The reader shoots forward and backward, without warning. Dialogue is jammed together, with little indication from punctuation as to how a phrase might be handled. And behind all of this are the songs that the narrator remembers - songs from childhood, and really from another culture. Some songs are quoted multiple times - the context constantly providing a new understanding of the words.
Dark though it may be, there is life in these pages, and hope as well. There are relationships that are treasured and lost, and there is a future that is not caught in the grip of the Party. Surrounding all of this are the characters that are lost, that live in their own dashed hopes and unrealized futures. This heightens the contrast of the characters we meet - as we hope with them, and are disappointed with them.
I wonder if I should get this in German?
When we don't speak, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.
Ms. Muller opens and closes her novel, The Land of Green Plums, with this line so she must thinks it's important. It must be the key her novel's theme.
What meaning can we find in it?
The Land of Green Plums concerns a young woman sent from the Romanian countryside to attend school in the city during the closing years of Nicolae Ceausecu's dictatorship. As the novel follows her life and the lives of her friends, we see how all four are affected by the suicide of one, Lola, who hangs herself after realizing none of the school's authorities or the police will take action against the gym instructor who is sexually abusing her.
If we don't speak about things like this, how will that secrecy affect us, asks the opening line. How does the collective weight of all our silences damage us? There is a pop-psychology notion in America that we are only as sick as our secrets. If this is true, then the Romania of Ms. Muller's childhood was one very sick place. Her novel gives the reader a clear sense of the big picture by focusing on the specific smaller ones of her character's experiences. The daily grind of life under Ceausecu, the constant threat of surveillance, the lack of freedom, the lack of opportunity, were all mundane facts of life in Romania for Ms. Muller's characters.
After Lola's death, the narrator and her close friends all fall under the suspicion of government agents, though I missed whatever it was they did to be considered anti-government. This may be the point. The interrogations and the surveillance they endure seem pointless because they probably were. They were students who wrote a few poems that some might consider radical. It's difficult to see why any functioning government would consider them a threat. But they are seen as threats, so much so that they all end up applying for passports to leave the country of their birth knowing they will never return.
But if they tell their stories, they only seem foolish. The characters themselves do appear a bit foolish by the end of The Land of Green Plums, but it's the government itself that really comes away looking bad--the government and the people of Romania who acquiesced to it for so long. If we read the narrator as a stand-in for Ms. Muller and the novel as a portrait of the artist as a young woman, which I think is a justified reading, then the book is the author's reply to the opening line's question. Better to speak, on some level, than to remain silent, even though Ms. Muller had to flee Romania in order to speak freely.
Maybe that is the point Ms. Muller is leading us to--that we must face this push-pull between needing to tell the truth about ourselves and our fear that doing so will make us look bad. Can we face what really happened when doing so means facing our own complicity in a history we'd like to deny whether that history be personal or cultural? By writing The Land of Green Plums, Ms. Muller answers in favor of speaking, though the price be high.