The Appointment: A Novel [Hardcover]

Herta Muller (Author), Michael Hulse (Translator), Philip Boehm (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 13, 2001

From the winner of the IMPAC Award and the Nobel Prize, a fierce novel about a young Romanian woman's discovery of betrayal in the most intimate reaches of her life

"I've been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp." Thus begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceaucescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before; this time, she believes, will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. "Marry me," the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country.

As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot trying to flee to Hungary, to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them, to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers, and to Paul, her lover, her one source of trust, despite his constant drunkenness. In her distraction, she misses her stop to find herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the appointment pale by comparison.

Herta Müller pitilessly renders the humiliating terrors of a crushing regime. Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment confirms her standing as one of Europe's greatest writers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The hardships and humiliations of Communist Romania are on display in this taut novel by the winner of the European Literature Prize (Müller, author of the well-received Land of Green Plums, emigrated to Berlin after being persecuted by the Romanian secret police). The narrator, an unnamed young dress-factory worker of the post-WWII generation, has been summoned for questioning by the secret police; she has been caught sewing notes into men's suits destined for Italy, with the desperate message "marry me" along with her address. Accused of prostitution in the workplace (and told she is lucky the charge is not treason), she loses her job, and her life becomes subject to the whims of Major Albu, who summons her for random interrogation sessions. Her major preoccupation is holding on to her sanity. This is a nearly impossible feat in a society where opportunity is limited, trust is a commodity as scarce as decent food or shoe leather, and even sinister Party henchmen are shown to be trapped in a ridiculous charade. As she travels to a questioning session, the woman spools out the tale of her past: her attempt to achieve independence after a first marriage, only to hastily fall into a second one with Paul, an alcoholic who fashions illegal television antennas for the black market; and her friendship with the beautiful and doomed Lilli, a fellow factory worker. The sharp generational divide following the war and the dreadful ways in which people learn to cope with the Communist regime are threaded throughout as are some lighter moments, shaky though they may be. Appropriately disorienting and tightly wound, this perfectly controlled narrative offers a chilling picture of human adaptation and survival under oppression.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

A Romanian-born resident of Berlin, Muller, whose novel The Land of Green Plums won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Prize, here tells the grim story of a woman repeatedly summoned by Major Albu, a government flunky intent on determining whether she is a traitor to the state. Her crime? Sewing handwritten notes into the pockets of the men's slacks she makes at her factory job, listing her name and contact information and imploring the purchaser to marry her so that she can flee the repressive Ceausescu. While the protagonist's pleas are intercepted and ineffectual, Muller's message to her readers is not. Indeed, her depiction of life in Communist Romania forces readers to feel tremendous antipathy for the repressive regime. Palpably bitter, Muller crafts a world in which alcoholism, violence, corruption, and personal betrayal are routine. As the woman's grandfather declares, "Life was wet fart, not even worth the bother of putting your shoes on." This tone permeates the book, making it both bleak and overwhelming. Still, it is recommended for public and academic libraries and for those interested in understanding the effects of government oppression.
- Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books; First Edition edition (September 13, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080506012X
• ISBN-13: 978-0805060126
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #924,559 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Born in Romania in 1953, Herta Müller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceauşescu's secret police. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin. She won the IMPAC Award for her novel The Land of the Green Plums, and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What a Century of Misery was Ours!, December 4, 2009

By 

Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Appointment: A Novel (Paperback)

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, this novel is potent both as a whole and in every clause. Rarely has 'ugliness' been rendered so beautifully! Müller's poetry is completely hermeneutic and untranslatable, composed of words literally clipped and pasted like a dada collage, but her prose is translucent as carbon monoxide. The woman she represents as her narrator breathes the sour gas of repression and harassment, but survives. Translators Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm catch Müller's inflection vividly and render her culturally-specific metaphors and allusions accessible for an English reader. Müller may well be as sour and edgy a person as her narrator, from various accounts, but she is a writer of the highest rank.

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars beautifully fragmented, May 26, 2002

By 

Emily Held (Pittsburgh, PA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Appointment: A Novel (Hardcover)

Beautifully written prose and an incredibly fitting cover photo, this is a fictional account of a Romanian factory worker punished for pinning notes into the pockets of outgoing clothing.

This 'why' quickly takes a back seat to the out-of-sequence internal flashbacks that slowly reveal most of her adult life and routine. Told in a manner both simple and complex, it's not unlike a self-confession, and in this I think it makes its mark. The goings-on of the particular appointment doesn't seem, at the end to matter, for as the speaker tells us, "The trick is not to go mad."

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Stream of consciousness in Romania, November 24, 2009

By 

Felicia Filsdotter (San Diego, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Appointment: A Novel (Hardcover)

Sounding initially like Kafka's "The Trial," the book is narrated by a woman enroute to yet another mysterious interrogation. We slip between multiple layers of her life, learning of the present tram ride, her past family life and friendships, her previous life in the factory and her boss, and her interrogator. I'm certain some academic will devise a fascinating graphic representation of the patterns by which the novel travels through time and space. For me, the richest parts of the book are the minor characterizations -- among them, Frau Micu, the demented neighbor woman -- portrayed in such acute and poignant detail. There are touching and terrifying portrayals of the ways in which people come together and apart, love and hate -- that are certainly connected to the historical context, but the dynamics of which are not limited to that frame of reference. In fact, for a more "historical" portrayal of the effects of the Ceausescu regime's effect on relationships and trust, I recommend "Train to Trieste" by the Romanian writer Domnica Radulescu. Although also fiction, it demonstrates more directly the constant suspicion that permeates personal relationships in that era. For both books, though, I have problems with the endings: Muller's for its ambiguity and Radulescu's for its neatness. Maybe that's because the story's not really over.