Customer Reviews

Nadirs (European Women Writers)

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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.

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.

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.

Herta Muller's little book of juxtaposed vignettes is really like a book of diary entries. In each story the conveyance of old world village life is expertly imparted as an encapsulated sometimes primitive realm that is only glued together by superstition, animal cruelty, endless gossip, a blurring of moral codes and amorous liaisons that distort and stunt the religious and moral development of the next generation, a broken lot in every conceivable way. When the foundation of normalcy is broken, what is there to cling to and follow as an example? And while all the aforementioned happenings are grim and evocative of a wider sense of despair, Muller's honed literary craft points to the source of all the misery: Communism. The socialism that is expressed has a negative trickle down effect that makes a bad life even worse and changes once normal and self-respecting human beings into the exact opposite of their God given good potential. Up is down. Black is white. And 2 + 2 = 5. Everything is off kilter, but there is not a natural ebb and flow to it. The hardened fluidity of the language mirrors the hardened life. The lifestyles of the farmers and villagers are forcibly held together by sheer tenacity or perhaps fear. Although that is not as tangibly expressed as it was in Muller's novels The Appointment or The Land of Green Plums, the implication is defiantly there. The black pall is an ever present character laced throughout all the stories, even though the reader is never bluntly told of such a shadowy form, for it is felt more than anything else. Though labeled fiction, this work is absolutely autobiographical. One can almost sense Muller herself with her eyes closed recalling her warped and brutal past, each vignette slowly pouring forth in a stream-of-consciousness manner. The observer in the stories (supposedly Muller herself) is like a pure child who has yet to be contaminated by the evils of communism/socialism. The village elders (by their actions) don't help, either. With their licentiousness and venomous verbal backstabbing, there is a sense that something is not right or copacetic, but it is just not pinned down. The observer of these tales just doesn't have the 100% grasp that what she is experiencing and seeing is evil, is totalitarian, is mind altering in all the worst ways. The observer and her family are castaways in their own community. As that is so, there is a constant element of re-victimization. While all the stories in Nadirs are exceptional, the title story alone, Nadirs, is worth the price of the book. In one part of the story, jack-o-lanterns are seen being used as lanterns, but their carved faces of horror express what the repressed villagers and farmers must perpetually mask. All in all, I would highly recommend Nadirs for a first time reader of Herta Muller; it is a work that will give the reader a greater insight of the the future books to come. Under the socialist regime of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, Muller (through each book) tries to peel away the warped homage and reverence the megalomaniac and his wife thought they were so deserving of.

Anamazing work by the Nobel Prize-winning author. I shared this with a native of Romania, whose father told her a great deal about the German-speaking section, and she said the book was highly realistic.

Nadirs (European Women Writers) by Herta Muller, who recently won the the Nobel Prize for Literature (click for my article), is a collection of mostly autobiographical short stories about surviving a communist regime and personal drama. This 120-page work is translated from her native German language, and is one of only a few of her works that have been translated into English. Muller straddles the surreal and reality in her stories, and in some cases this balance is executed better than in others. However, her concise and detailed language paints vivid pictures for readers of harsh conditions and deep sadness and other emotions.

In many ways these short stories are more like long, narrative poems filled with imagery, metaphor, and illusion, but there are occasions when Muller clearly outlines what is happening in these families and how it impacts each narrator, who in many cases is a young girl. In "Rotten Pears," the young narrator travels with her father and her aunt to a village to sell their vegetables and fruit, but staying overnight in a strange village reveals dark family secrets and alludes to other possibilities.

With stories ranging from just a few pages to 60 pages or more, Nadirs has something for the quick trip on the subway or the long leisurely moments on the couch, though many of these stories deal with deep sadness and betrayal. Muller also is clearly a poet, economizing her words to create images that will burn into readers minds and remain there for many hours, days, weeks, and months. She uses repetition and juxtapositions of black and white, noise and silence, and other techniques to peak readers' curiosity.

Overall an excellent collection to get a sense of Muller's style, and many of these stories resemble nightmares from a child's point of view. Unfortunately, the short story from which the collection's name is taken was the least engaging and overly surreal. With Nadirs (European Women Writers) being the longest story in the collection, it was tough to get through and ultimately some readers (including me) may give up and skip to other stories in the collection.

NADIRS was the first published book of the most recent Nobel laureate, Herta Müller. It first was published in 1982, while Müller still lived in Ceausescu's Romania (albeit after state-censorship). It consists of one lengthy story or novella, "Nadirs", and fourteen other stories or pieces, some very brief, somewhat like a Kafka parable. I was impressed by the one other Müller work I have read, "The Passport", but NADIRS leaves me cold - indeed, it is painful.

One principle I had set for myself in reviewing books on Amazon was not to review a book unless I had read it (recently) in its entirety. That is the chief reason why to date I have not posted any one-star reviews; as soon as I realize that a book is that execrable, I will not waste further time and read it to the end. Now, I confess that I was unable to read NADIRS from beginning to end. Nonetheless, I am breaching my own principle, in large part because I feel I did read enough of it to fairly judge it by my own critical standards, such as they are.

As in "The Passport", Müller's prose is stark and choppy. There is even more of the surreal and the fantastic than there was in "The Passport". The theme of the book is the brutal, nonsensical, and oppressive conditions of everyday life in the Romania of Müller's girlhood. Those three aspects combine for some very unpleasant reading - like a ball-peen hammer continually tapping on my skull while atonal modern music plays at high volume, accompanied by (although on a different rhythm entirely) a searingly bright strobe light. It is painful, at least intellectually.

In trying to figure out my strong adverse response to NADIRS, I first tried out a theory I have from time to time entertained in the past - namely, that for me literature and the arts should make life more enjoyable or meaningful. Since I know enough about the miseries and cruelties of the world (pretty much vicariously, thankfully), I don't need another dose - at least given the ever-decreasing amount of time left to me. But that theory doesn't adequately explain my discontent, because (to say nothing of Dante and Dostoevsky) I did appreciate "The Passport", which also is a grim, depressing portrayal of life in Ceausescu's Romania, told through a mixture of fantasy and stark realism. What, then, is the difference? For one thing, "The Passport" is not as saturated with nightmarish breaks with reality as is NADIRS, perhaps because in that earlier work Müller had to be less direct, more opaque, in her critical depiction of life in Romania since she still lived there. But more so, I suspect that "The Passport", although only a few years later, simply is the work of a more mature and accomplished writer.

I cannot recommend NADIRS. My two-star assessment may be on the generous side. But I will give Müller at least one more try, probably "The Land of the Green Plums".

This collection of short stories and one-page snapshots depicts in a naturalistic manner (`feces with white worms crawling on them') a Romanian village after World War II seen through the eyes of a child.
It is a world of flowers and urine, of desolate poverty, alcoholism (`in the summer the whole village smells of schnapps'), adultery, sickness and violence by drunken fathers and by children against children (`the school children write on him with chalk till he cries').
The villages still suffers from the ravages of the war.

In this stagnant world the child has dreams of beauty: `I lay down in the tall grass and made myself trickle into the earth. I waited for the big willows to come to me to root their branches in me and spread their leaves in me. I hoped they would say: you are the most beautiful swamp in the world.', but also nightmares: `I saw Mother lying naked and frozen in Russia, with scraped legs and green lips from the turnips.'

Overall, there is a lack of real emotion (also for the reader). The text nearly never transcends the pure descriptions (`Village Chronicle'), the dry sense observations or the jejune repetitions.

Only for Herta Müller fans.

An excellent book by Herta Mueller and others. Had not read anything by her before (prior to her getting the Nobel prize for literature) but will now. An excellent story-teller. Somewhat depressing stories, but real nonetheless.

Congratulations, Herta, on winning the Nobel Prize in Literature! I thoroughly enjoyed this novel: it is a mixture of the little cruelties of life and the gross injustices of systemic violence that all dictatorships commit. I recommend it highly.