Customer Reviews

The Land of Green Plums

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Four students, Edward, Georg, Kurt and "I", the narrator, develop a close friendship in the aftermath of the alleged suicide of Lola. She had shared a room at the student dorm with the narrator and four other girls. Lola came from the south of the country and was in many ways different from the majority of students. "I", the other outsider among the girls, was entrusted with Lola's diary, and tried to hide it in her suitcase. However, there were no safe places for secrets anymore; suspicion and intrigue was palpable. The friendship of the four young people was in part born out their lives' otherness: they were members of Banat-Svabian (German) minority in Romania; their fathers had been SS officers, their mothers were eking out a living as seamstresses in different small communities away from the university town. They feel connected through their language and different upbringing. Speaking through the narrator, Herta Müller weaves an extraordinarily rich and haunting portrait of daily life under the totalitarian Ceausescu regime of the 1980s. Exemplifying the novel's central theme - to bear witness to the open and hidden horrors - the author depicts the individual experiences of the four central characters and their interactions as they are increasingly caught in the net of the security police and its ever observant helpers. After leaving town, being sent to different work places, they invent a special undercover language or terminology to communicate by letter...

"HERZTIER" (1993) -published in 1996 under the English title "The Land of Green Plums" - transcends the usual definition of a 'novel': it has been called a "prose poem" by some commentators. For me, having read it in its German original, a definition as 'poem' does not really capture the book's essence, despite its often poetic language. I don't know of any other text quite like it. Applying a deliberately simple structure: short paragraphs, short sentences, extensive indirect dialog, often introduced by 'he said', she 'said', Müller's language is nevertheless highly complex. Even without any interactive dialog, the narrative is vivid and, once the reader is used to Müller's approach, it flows despite there being no coherent plot and the reader has to keep abreast through many jumps in timelines and scenarios. Some sections are even funny in their own somewhat macabre way, such as Captain Pjele and his dog with the same name. The reader senses different layers to the text - the straightforward surface structure of the narrator's reminiscences is in fact hiding a extraordinarily refined and evocative range of images and metaphors. One feels tempted to go back and reread sections. Fast readers be warned: this is a book that requires slow reading, with pauses for reflection. At times Müller uses her own or local terminology. The German title, Herztier, for example, does not exist as a term, it is a composite of 'heart' and 'animal'. The author gives subtle hints as to its significance: everybody has one, sometimes it disappears as quickly as a mouse, other times one can hold on to somebody else's ... The 'green plums' in the English title also have symbolic meaning - they stand in part of the strong yearning for truth and at the same time the brutality of its suppression.

Herta Müller's "Land of Green Plums" won the 1998 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the richest award of its kind that also awarded the translator, Michael Hofmann. The author was born in Romania into the German language minority. After years of publication ban, she was able to emigrate to Germany in 1987. Her 2009 Literature Nobel Prize recognizes her unique literary qualities and, hopefully expands the international readership for her work. HERZTIER was my first experience with the author and it will definitively not be the last. Herta Müller's writing have an eerie attraction, a deceptive lightness of language, rich development of characters and social conditions; profound evocation of a difficult period in recent European history that is difficult to leave behind after the book is closed. While Romania represented the central context in the book, much could have applied to other countries behind the "Iron Curtain". A rare talent to bring these very divers elements together in a novel. [Friederike Knabe]

This novel is one of the most powerful ones I have ever read. The author has a wonderful way of making us feel for the characters, and it is written in such a compassionate and moving way. This is right up there on my list of great books along with Byatt's Possession and another book that reminded me of this one: The God of Small Things.

This is an interesting book. I confess I was drawn to it as much by the beautiful cover art (a Jan Saudek photograph) as by the compelling subject matter. Then, when I had it in my hands, I was annoyed at the bio in the back flap, which stated that the author had been persecuted for refusing to cooperate with the totalitarian regime in Romania. I thought, don't advertise yourself --- let the book speak for itself. And then I started reading.

Well, it's not an ordinary read --- and the things which make it original are also, in my opinion, the ones that cause its major flaws. Muller's prose is extremely lyrical --- indeed it is no coincidence that the translator, Michael Hoffmann, is a poet. The book could (and arguably ought) to be read as a long prose poem. Then it would be downright gorgeous. But, alas, it's supposed to be a novel.

And that's where the book's main problems lie. The narrative is loose and disjointed, too much so for this reader's taste. And some things are scarcely credible --- the main characters seem to be regularly brought in for harsh police interrogations, but they don't seem to consider leaving the country. The fate of people who are killed while trying to escape Romania is often mentioned; but the strange thing is, the narrator and her friends seem to have a much easier option, which is not considered for most of the book. And then at a certain point they just apply for passports, obtain them, and leave. So what was the point of enduring so much? Surely people so harassed and oppressed would have left at the first opportunity, if there was an opportunity at all.

Another problem, relating to the one mentioned above, is that the characters are a bit two-dimensional --- they never really come alive for you. I'd have loved, for instance, to know more about Lola, the poor country girl who enters into a spiral of degradation and finally commits suicide. The narrator's three friends, Kurt, Georg and Edgar, are (perhaps they are meant to be) interchangeable: none of them have any defining traits, save for the fact that two of them are red-haired while the third has black hair. A novel, I feel, should be strong in character development. And this one is anything but.

Also, the main characters all belong to the German minority in Romania. I didn't know that such a minority even existed, but apparently that lies behind many of the problems faced by the men and women in the book. I would have appreciated a little more information on this issue.

My advice regarding this book would be, read it as a poem. Don't expect a tight, cohesive and satisfying narrative --- that it is not. Read it for its rich imagery, its wistfulness, its sense of the survival of beauty even in the middle of the most numbing bleakness.

This is not a book for everyone. It is almost a poetic essay on the horrors of existence under an irrational dictatorship in Ceausescu's Romania and the helplessness experienced by people who wish for more of a chance to express their individuality and to live their live fully. One could easily substitute almost any totalitarian state (Nazi Germany, contemporary N. Korea, Pol Pot Cambodia, etc.) for the site of the story. I found it a bit lacking in narrative but quite powerful as an impression of what life can be like under such circumstance. The story is told through the eyes of the one developed character, a female college student, whose relative passiveness in the face of the regime is a bit difficult to understand. As a matter of fact, the choices presented in the book for such characters is escape, suicide or acquiescence. Why the protagonist and her friends do not run from the scene is not completely clear. I would have liked to know more about them as people as well.

The writing itself is quite lovely and very unique. It is an original way to represent reality and I admire the poetic skills of the translator. It was originally published in German. The author is a Nobel Prize winner but this book cannot be considered her main contribution to that award. For readers who are poetically inclined and do not require rapid, prose narrative, this book is quite worthwhile reading. It is surely a potent anti-authoritarian piece of literature.

My five-star rating has little to do with liking this book, or even understanding it. But it kept me reading with nightmare fascination. Herta Müller's recent Nobel Prize aside, this is clearly a major statement, whether as an historical document, a work of art, or the depiction from the inside of a mind fragmented by fear and the oppression of a totalitarian regime. For Müller, born to a German family in Romania, lived her young adult life under the repression of the Ceausescu state security apparatus, finally escaping to Germany in 1987 at the age of 34. Like fragments from a psychiatrist's couch that painfully piece themselves together into a coherent story, this is a scrapbook of spiritual debris, the record of a mind almost pulverized by pressure, that somehow managed to regain its sanity.

The book begins in a series of surreal images: "A child refuses to let her nails be cut. This hurts, says the child. The mother ties the child to a chair with the belts from her dresses. [...] The child knows: the mother in her tightly-tied love is going to cut up my hands. Then she'll have to stick the cut-up fingers in the pocket of her housedress and go into the courtyard, as if she meant to throw them away. And in the yard, where no one can see her, she'll have to eat the child's fingers." This symbolic torture stands in for real torture, of which there is remarkably little in the book; the worst the state can do is reserved for the mind, not the body. Working more like poetry than prose, Müller's fragments swirl obsessively around a number of images: the evil green plums of the title, mulberries, animal blood, red-shanked sheep, dried cows' tails, nuts, river stones, nail-clippers, barbers, dentists, underwear, whisper-thin nylons with runs in them, snatches of song, strands of hair, physical disease, and an animal life-force constantly threatening to turn against its host. The latter entity, here translated as "heart-beast," gives the book its original German title, HERZTIER.

Although the recurrent images become, if anything, even more obsessive throughout the book, it gradually edges into some kind of narrative focus. It seems to begin in the author's college days, when she is living with other girls in one dormitory while maintaining a cautious friendship with three men in another. Already they are under suspicion, whether as outsiders (all four are members of the German-speaking minority in Romania) or just by being intellectuals, and all are called in from time to time for interrogation. Nevertheless, all four graduate and are moved to stultifying jobs out of the city. But the atmosphere of fear only tightens, leading them all to compromise each other and, even worse, themselves. All eventually lose their posts, and most leave the country, as the author did herself. Though these emigrations seem surprisingly easy, they are no escape; the state has a wide reach. People mysteriously disappear in transit. Even in Germany, emigrés may receive death sentences by mail or telephone, and later suffer some fatal accident. Nobody is safe. And even if a person can escape with her life, as Müller did, the mental trauma may never be reversed. This remarkable book is the record of a person trying to put herself together piece by piece; she may not fully succeed, but the miracle is that she can even try.

Romania has probably never been my idea of Paradise -- not when it was the outermost corner of the Roman Empire, not in the millennia since, not even today -- but it was surely closer to Hell on Earth during the phony-communist tyranny of Ceauçescu than ever before. Nevertheless, though 'everyone' around them was obsessed with fleeing at any risk, the four young dissidents of this novel were painfully ambiguous about exiling themselves. As it turned out, the first of them to flee wouldn't last long in Germany anyway. But given how vile and perilous life was for them in Romania, as described anyway, one HAS to ask what held them so tenaciously. Family? Yet their families were hateful. Idealism? Long shed! Fear of otherness? Well, yes, that for sure...

The narrator is a young woman from a German-Romanian village, whose father had been an SS officer. Sent to the city for education and to make something of herself, she hooks up to three young men whose situations are similar. The narrator also forms tortured relationships with two women of her own age, a fellow student who commits suicide and the alienated daughter of a Party official of some importance. Is the narrator Herta Müller herself? Yes, of course, and no, of course not. The subject matter of Müller's novels is always the paranoic nightmare of life under the Dictatorship, with its interrogations, its betrayals, its abject corruption of all aspects of personality, but each novel tells a somewhat different story. As a reader, this time, I choose to think that "The Land of Green Plums" is a carefully crafted fiction, whatever details it may include from Müller's own experiences. It's all the more amazing that way. The poetic vividness of the narrator's memories need not be compromised by fact-checking. Vivid they are! Heart-rackingly personal, full of jagged coded symbolism, a whole interiorized secret language, in which 'fingernail clippers' mean 'interrogation' and 'blood drinking' stands for collaboration with the tyranny. This language is not always easily deciphered. It's fragmented and elusive, and any usual chronological constraints of narration do not apply. The narrator is simultaneously a village girl, a student, a woman the 'authorities' want to hound out of existence, and a atomized non-person-in-exile. What a powerful emotional tool Müller's cryptic coded language is, nevertheless! If anguish can ever be beautiful, Müller makes it so. Her originality and imagination are dazzling.

I chose to read this book, Müller's best known, in English because of the respect I have for the skill of translator Michael Hofmann. Having read it once that way, I certainly plan to read it again in German. It's good enough for the effort. The German title, by the way, has nothing to do with plums; it's "Herztier", a made-up word meaning literally 'heart-beast'. The English translation is possibly misleading; "The Land of Green Plums" might suggest an aura of nostalgia or romanticism that doesn't fit the book on any level. There are 'green plums' in the story, but they are toxic to those who eat them in the presence of anything honorable.

The six chief characters of Herztier are all 'dissidents'. They are perceived as such by the police, by their fellow students and colleagues at work, by their neighbors and families, even by strangers in the markets. One has to imagine them as 'standing out' conspicuously in how they dress, how they converse, how they cut or don't cut their hair. They are hated automatically, as 'beatniks' were in the 1950s in Middle America or 'skinheads' are today in many 'Free World' cities. One has to consider the possibility that their dissidence is deeper than political dissatisfaction. Don't they seem to realize as much, i.e. that they would be dissidents anywhere? The corruption and oppression that torments them in Romania is NOT just the weight of the totalitarian state, and Herztier is NOT just an agitprop critique of the "years of communism". Their society is as corrupt from the bottom up as from the top down. They are rejected and feared from below and above, most intensely by the little people around them who have accommodated, been coopted, perhaps even thrived on the police state. Many of the reviews of this book, and the blurb on the jacket, speak of Herta Müller's "triumph" against the corrosion of the totalitarian state. No question, Müller has triumphed as an artist, a Nobel prize winner. But I don't hear a blare of triumph - not even a bleat of relief - in her writing. Hers is a very bleak view of humanity as its own worst oppressor. It's a good thing she writes so well, or I wouldn't be able to tolerate her suffering.

I read this passage on the page 2: "The grass stands tall inside our heads. When we speak it gets mowed. Even when we don't." and fell in love with Muller's poetic prose and I didn't want the book to end.

The Land Of Green Plums is the best book I've read this year.


Muller's powerful description of a forbidden world (that many of us might have imagined otherwise during our youth) is beyond unforgettable!

The plot is pretty simple: This is the story of 4 young people living in Romania during the years of Ceau'escu and how they dream of living a better life. It shows how deeply the dictatorship kills the soul of its victims, those who live under its dominance.

Muller is a stunningly gorgeous writer, and The Land of Green Plums is a magnificent book: compelling plot, original characters, ...and poetic post-modernistic images, narrated by an incredible powerful voice: simple in structure, yet so complex in meaning.

I loved this novel and I would recommend it to everyone looking for magical poetry and timeless literature.

I'm not going to say much but, it's one of those books that really catches you. The writing style is unlike anything I've read before. The content, the characters, everything. It's sort of like entering a dream-state when you read the writing of Herta Muller.

Highly recommended.

For anyone who has ever believed that socialism of any kind was or is a good thing, Herta Muller's The Land of Green Plums would be an eye-opening novel that might make you think otherwise. My father, who grew up under socialist Nazism and then communism, worked very hard to escape it. He was to the very end, a man who always decried it and saw it for what it really was. So, from the very get-go, I've had a natural dislike for ideologies embossed with socialist leanings, regardless if what is being espoused at the time is en vogue and the cause caleb for a sundry group of political neophytes. The Land of Green Plums, for me, as a reader, is an excellent literary conveyance of the true corrosive evils of any and all regimes which foster a "robust" government. When the individual will is ignored and the totality of people are thrust under the umbrella of a government/regime that thinks it knows better than the society at large, then the clarion call must be made.

In clear, direct and crystalline prose, Muller depicts the lives of four young students who live in the hinterlands of Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania. Hoping to cast off their provincial mind-set and old world limitations, they travel to the "cosmopolitan" city in the vain hopes of acquiring a liberty not known to them in the regions in which they left. In the city, they want to start afresh and create, mold and foster an identity that has possibility, excitement, independence, modernism and free will. But once in the city, the core students/characters: Kurt, Georg, Edgar and the nameless female protagonist who narrates the story-discover that it is not only in the backwoods of their homelands that are severely limited; the city is a mere reflection of their provinces. And they know that the source of the deadening pall which they are experiencing is flowing from their president: "Everyone's a villager here. Our heads may have left home, but our feet are just standing in a different village. No cities can grow in a dictatorship, because everything stays small when it's being watched." Page 44.

Under the dictatorship, as expressed by Muller, small achievements are not so small. They can not be large or the Securitate (the secret police) will get them. But when not caught, joy is supreme, and possibilities are endless: "We looked for things that would set us apart because we read books ...We imagined the land where the books came from a land of thinkers. We sniffed at the pages and caught ourselves sniffing our own hands out of habit. We were surprised our hands didn't blacken as we read, the way they did from the ink in the newspapers and books printed in our country." Pages 46-47. To be caught deviating from the governmental norm would bring possibilities of this nature: "When the farmers harvested their cornfields, they found withered or bloated corpses, picked over by crows. The farmers took the corn and left the corpses, because it was better not to see them. In the late autumn, the tractors ploughed them under." Page 61 "The rule of the bourgeoisie and the landowning class is long gone..." Page 80. Complete deprivation of one's livelihood will alter human behavior; first there will be envy that will fester and gnaw and then grow into action: "She only wore the floral-patterned dress one day. She had dresses from Greece and from France. Sweaters from England and jeans from America. She had powder, lipstick, and mascara from France, jewelry from Turkey. And whisper-thin nylons from Germany. The women in the offices didn't like Tereza. You could tell what they were thinking when they saw Tereza. They were thinking: All those things that Tereza has are worth fleeing for. They became envious and bitter." Page 108. But with materialism aside, there were even greater losses than that, like the Typewriter Decree, whereby typewriters had to be registered. So if anyone spoke out against the regime via the written word, the source could be located and the detractor appropriately made to disappear, which was not an infrequent occurrence. Bit by bit, due to a madman's ego, socialism would flesh itself out and destroy old Romania. Citizens had to sign warrants and pay for the bulldozing of their own homes, which would then be replaced by massive apartment buildings, the epitome of socialist living, according to Ceausescu and his cronies. People not in compliance, could be "...called up to Heaven at the drop of a hat..." Page 136.

The tragedy in The Land of Green Plums is that life is like a flat line or worse, only altered by the beck and call of those in power who pick favorites. Citizens are watched, and normal human action is repressed to such a degree that people are evolved into monsters, not by their own choice, but due to their lack of normal expression and development: "It was bleeding. I licked the blood off with my tongue, so it wouldn't run down my sleeve...They left me there wounded, they stood by the ditch and watched me bleed. They had eyes like thieves. I was afraid they lost their minds. The minute these people see blood, they gather to drink, to drink me dry...They make me sick with their blood guzzling...That they lure their kids into the slaughterhouse with dried cowtails and intoxicate them with kisses of blood. " Page 124. It is almost reminiscent of Vlaud Tepesh, Prince of Wallachia, the ruler and war hero who loved impaling his enemies and feasting upon bread and their blood. Also the inspiration behind Dracula. It's not a surprise that Nicolae Ceausescu resurrected him as an exemplar of Machiavellian perfection and terror.

But on the whole, the real essence of the book is expressed on pages 218-219: "When we lost our jobs, we realized that we were worse off without that reliable distress than when we were under its constraint. While we were failures in the eyes of the people around us whether we had work or not, we now became failures in our own eyes as well...We were broken, sick of the rumors about the dictator's imminent death, weary of people killed trying to flee. We were moving closer and closer to obsession with flight, without even noticing it. Failure was as normal to us as breathing." An overwhelming and intrusive government/regime will always bring failure, not matter how "positive" the intentions may be. Though it is not mellifluously written, it is jarring poetry nonetheless and an absolute must read!!

Muller has chosen not to follow a typical narrative form of storytelling of beginning, middle, and end. That caused me some confusion at first. When I realized that "surreal" fit the content as well as the style, I began to appreciate the book.