Nadirs (European Women Writers) [Paperback]

Herta Müller (Author), Sieglinde Lug (Translator, Afterword)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 1999 | Series: European Women Writers

Juxtaposing reality and fantasy, nightmares and dark laughter, Nadirs is a collection of largely autobiographical stories based on Herta Müller's childhood in the Romanian countryside. The individual tales reveal a child s often nightmarish impressions of life in her village. Seamlessly mixing reality with dream-like images, they brilliantly convey the inner, troubled life of a child and at the same time capture the violence and corruption of life under an oppressive state. Herta Müller has been one of the most prolific and acclaimed German-language writers of the last decade. Born in 1953 in the Banat, a German-language region of Romania, she emigrated to West Berlin in 1987 and currently resides in Hamburg. She has received numerous literary awards, including the Kleist Prize. In 1998 her novel The Land of Green Plums was awarded the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

M?ller, who won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for The Land of Green Plums, is considered one of the most gifted contemporary German-language writers, a claim this newly translated collection of stories would seem to prove. Once again, M?ller takes us back to Communist Romania. But unlike her previous work, Nadirs is a very personal book, as much about M?ller's own family sagas as it is about the inescapable scars of communism. Perhaps the most pertinent word to describe this dainty collection is contradictionAthe narratives portray what is real and undeniable in a surreal and almost absurd way, yet the seemingly unadorned storytelling demands the maximum concentration from the reader. Originally published in German ten years ago, this book was well worth the wait; it is an important achievement in contemporary Eastern European literature.AMirela Roncevic, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Muller has sewn together a collection of semiautobiographical stories of her bleak childhood in Romania. Poverty, sickness, isolation, and sexual promiscuity run throughout the stories. Her family and community fear God, inherit and pass on superstitions, and gossip endlessly. Muller presents stark portraits of life on small farms in Romania. At times the stories are hard to follow, but Muller's girl narrator is just as confused, trying to piece together nightmares, dreams, and memories of her heartbreaking home life. She feels isolated from her parents, while the village keeps its distance from the family with rumors of illegitimacy. The German-speaking village itself is an island within Romania. The author does allow her narrator to escape the countryside, only to live in the ridged confusion of city life. This is not a sentimental book, but Muller's keen sense of showing rural life as opposed to describing it makes this a very emotional and disturbing one. Michelle Kaske --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 126 pages
• Publisher: Univ of Nebraska Pr (September 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0803282540
• ISBN-13: 978-0803282544
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #624,868 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

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A collection of author POV dealing with rampant animal abuse, incest, and alcoholism. Welcome to Romania!, November 28, 2009

By 

E. Gee "edge" (West Palm Beach) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Nadirs (European Women Writers) (Paperback)

Nadir

Romanian-German author POV collection of memories of life in Pre-wall fall Romania. The animal abuse will make you sick alone.

Incest stories as normal, as well as alcoholism is as old as the hills.

Her writing style is why she received (deserved) the Nobel. When you read her stories,

every sentence could be the title of a chapter. Almost Hemmingway-esque

in the amount of information per sentence is compounded by the 'reporting'

or observational style of the stories offering little (very little) editorials.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nadirs by Herta Muller, January 30, 2010

By 

scott89119 "scott89119" (Whittier, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nadirs (European Women Writers) (Paperback)

Nadir [ney-der] (n): The lowest point; point of greatest adversity or despair.

Nadirs is a series of short stories of varying lengths, though they follow no strict storylines and are instead rather like surrealist portraits of how a child perceives their (brutal) environment. It is difficult to review this book from a critical perspective, because the majority of it reads like a simple Romanian countrygirl's innermost thoughts, but transmogrified into a repression-tinted art. She has every right to her dreams, as everyone does, though the Communist regime would snatch them from her if they could. Because of Muller's defeated yet indifferent tone, the stories read like stark still pictures peopled with those resigned to their fates. The language is small but dense with meaning and imagery, and while it sometimes veers off into poorly translated gobbledygook ("The rotten pears creep back into her skin" -really?) it is never less than captivating and original. Of special note are the book's two closing stories, "Black Park" and "Workday", whose simplicities (like the other stories as well) belie an almost tragic psychological insight. A more than worthy addition to any Eastern European lit collection.

4.0 out of 5 stars Muller's poetic debut, June 28, 2011

By 

Dallas Fawson (Salt Lake City, Utah) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Nadirs (European Women Writers) (Paperback)

Herta Muller, more so than almost any other author I've read, writes prose in a very poetic way. Her sentences are short and clipped, though incredibly descriptive:

"The gardens are intensely green. The fences are floating after moist shadows. The window panes glide bare and bright from one house to the other. The church tower is turning, the heroes' crucifix is turning.."

Her prose has both the vague beauty and word flow of excellent poetry, which is both a good and a bad thing. It allowed me a beautiful visualization of Romania, somewhere I've never been to, where she describes everything from the foliage to the different feces in the outhouse.

The weakness of this type of writing is that is at times very distant: it describes characters genders, actions and basic personality, but we get little characterization. We know who these characters are and how they act, but we do not know why.

All told, this is a powerful debut from Muller, who would later write the wonderful Land of Green Plums, among others.