Customer Reviews

The Appointment: A Novel

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
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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.

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."

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.

Well, I might be in a minority here, but I truly enjoyed the book. True, it didn't follow a strict linear format, but then, neither did the protagonist's life ... I thought this one was more clear than her previous book, "The Land of Green Plums." Recommended.

Muller's The Appointment is more of an experience than a novel. I say that because it has no discernable plot, vague characters, and not the faintest story arc for the reader to track. Instead it is a intelligently-written telling of the thought processes one woman experiences while on the way to an appointment with a tyrannical man who enjoys occasionally browbeating her over the notes she slips in coats at her garment factory, simply saying "Marry Me" with her name and address. The protagonist dreads these meetings, and her mind is already heightened by anxiety and despair. Despair pervades every page of the book, but Muller is a very talented author, and even in the darkest scenes there is presence and a very dry string of humor. As the protagonist's day progresses, and the memories turn more and more enigmatic, the reader is given a simplistic view of life in an oppressive society, where a walnut can bring you joy and alcoholism is excused as a given. It is a testament to Muller's skill that the book is strange yet never dull, with a keen sensitivity throughout. Recommended for any fan of European or challenging literature.

THe reviewer who said s/he didn't like Picasso and felt this book was Picasso-esque provided, I think, the most accurate and succinct description of this book. However, unlike the other reviewer, I enjoy Picasso's cubism and expressionistic figures, and I was moved by this book.

I found that it was important to read every word, because if I read to quickly and skipped over words and sometimes sentences, I missed important moments in the book. I had to re-read the last 5 pages to make sense of the ending. Reading every word of a novel can be taxing - and many novels don't warrant a close reading. But this one does.

The heroine of this novel lives her life waiting. She is a seamstress in a Romanian factory making fine men's overcoats for export to Italy. She is so desperate for escape from her pointless life that she inserts notes saying "Marry Me," with her name and address, into the linings of the coats. She has a live-in male friend who spends all of his time and most of her money drinking the day away. There is no future here - it's more like maintaining a big dog and the expense that goes with it.

This is Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall. So our heroine is in trouble again for those notes. It's happened before. Now she could lose her job or even be imprisoned. She's been summoned once more to the inspector's office - thus the book's title. The inspector is now taking a personal interest in her case; that is, he is taking a personal interest in her. Like other novels of Eastern Europe under Communism, the work is filled with angst and anomie. Waiting. Waiting for something.

We are treated to some great prose. "I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended--later, this disappeared and then showed up again in my mother." "The tap water tasted of chlorine, and the chlorine tasted of the sleep I wasn't getting." "His face froze up. Then his eyeballs glistened and turned into little squares. Out shot his arm, and he slapped me. He was better at that then he was at making coffee, tying shoelaces, or sharpening pencils." Herta Muller won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.

This stunning novel is a must read. I couldn't put it down and devoured it in a day. The story itself is as sad as it is haunting. Her prose is the kind of beautiful poetry you want to read over and over again to savor the sheer magic of it.

There must be many ways to write a novel. One of them is to write in a linear fashion, telling the story from beginning to end. Another way is to look into a situation, where many things are happening at once, and the author goes from one thing to the other. She's drawing a picture that has various aspects of the story, all shown at the same time. She puts the reader in medias res, in the middle of things so that one gets a deep appreciation for how the people are living there. This way of proceeding might be somewhat confusing at first, but once one catches on to the method, it is refreshing and insightful. In the hands of an author like Herda Muller, it makes the reader come away with having had a revelation, a real experience of understanding and new knowledge.

The story unfolds as a woman thinks as she travels by tram to meet with an interrogator when he sends for her. Her summons holds a particular dread and horror; the heaviness of the unknown.

The world is ugly. Everything is dirty, ruined, smeared. People are desperate because they are hungry, and not for food. Nothing is clean or pure or innocent or trustworthy.

Why would I recommend such a bleak book ? Because this book does the opposite of its inhabitants and reaches out to the reader. The Appointment is a beautifully written evocative book. Its story is told in layers like removing a bandage- unwrapping and unwrapping until the wound is exposed.

The use of metaphor and figurative language is exquisite. Translators Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm worked hard translating not just words but the mood of oppression and loneliness.