15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The "Unpainted Pictures" ..., December 8, 2009
This review is from: The Passport (Paperback)
... hundreds of small watercolors by the German Expressionist Emil Nolde, fill a small museum of their own in Berlin, near the Gendarmes' Market in the former East sector. Nolde was himself an anti-Semite and Nazi supporter in the 1920s, but because his paintings were classed by Hitler as "decadent art', he was ordered to refrain from painting of any sort during the years of World War 2. He disobeyed, hiding his watercolors successfully until the end of the war, painting daily in his remote home on the seacoast. Nolde's vision was a dark, tormented one, based on Germanic lore and the gloomy countryside he loved to roam. Whatever his politics, he was a great expressive painter.
The fragmented prose-poem chapters of Herta Müller's novella "Der Mensch ist ein grosser Fasan auf der Welt" (A Man is Just a Pheasant in the World, feebly re-titled 'The Passport' in English) remind me very strongly of Nolde's "Unpainted Pictures", or of any of the garishly colored, angular paintings of the "Brücke" school, by Erich Heckel, Max Pechstein, Ernst Kirchner, or Otto Müller. Herta Müller, born in the German-speaking Banat Province of Romania, was unquestionably not related to the painter Otto, but her narrative structures in this book are vividly pictorial, with eye-popping colors splashed on every page, white and primary red especially, and with descriptions of setting framing every occurrence. The dialogue in this book is as jagged and irrational as any Expressionist depiction of nudes in a studio or drinkers in a bar. There's something coarse and brutal about nearly every character in The Passport, as there is in the Berlin Street-Scenes painted by Ernst Kirchner or Max Beckmann. A smile in such a portrait automatically becomes a leer. Stated briefly, this short book is a beautifully-written portrayal of ugliness. And like an Expressionist painting, it can only be grasped emotionally, not rationally.
Windisch, the village miller, desperately wants 'papers' that will allow him to emigrate with his wife and grown-up daughter. Since he is an ethnic German, the Romanians want nothing better than to get rid of him and his ilk, but nothing can be done so reasonably in Ceausescu's police state. Every scrap of real of symbolic worth has to be extorted first, every degradation inflicted. Any would-be emigrant's wife has to 'search' for his birth certificate in the village priest's iron bed, and for his passport under the sheets of the militiaman's cot. Windisch is stubborn about his daughter's honor...
Yes, there is a story told in the ninety pages of this novella, but it takes an intuitive reader to unravel it. Müller's style here is far more allusive, symbolic, obscure than in the longer novel, "The Appointment", which I reviewed last week. I wouldn't rush to recommend The Passport as a first exposure to the 2009 Nobel Prize winner's work. Nevertheless, it's a masterpiece of the evocation of psychological anguish through mere words on a page.
The German title, by the way, is never explicated in English. It's a phrase spoken in disgust by a secondary character in the first chapter and repeated once by Windisch in despair in a chapter near the end. Is it a folk-saying of Romanian Germans? Possibly, but I take it as purely non-linear expressionism. Much of the novella has to be taken like that.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A stark glimpse into a bleak time and place, December 15, 2009
This review is from: The Passport (Paperback)
The first thing that struck me about Herta Muller's 1986 work The Passport was to wonder how good the translation would be considering the actual German title (Man is a Great Pheasant in the World) was ignored for a much simpler, but weaker title. I hoped it was just done for the usual American marketing purposes (simpler is better, don't use metaphor when you can use a concrete noun) and plugged ahead, but wondered throughout the book.
`The Pheasant' is essentially a prose poem, with staccato narrative, both in sentence structure as well as chapter organization. Another reviewer has compared it to expressionist painting, and I would agree. I found reading it very irritating at first, but eventually eased into it. Paradoxically, the simpler the prose here the harder it is to grasp at first. Like a poem, the words must be reflected upon, and often re-read, to gather the intent. The short chapters helped me along with that. They worked like film exposures into the lives of these characters, and had a cumulative effect until at the end I loved the book.
The story itself is bleak. It's set in a small village in Ceausescu-era Romania. The protagonist is Windisch, the village miller, who is trying to get passports to take his family to West Germany. He's bringing free flour to the town's mayor, who keeps promising him a passport in return, but it never materializes. As Muller shows us in sometimes surreal glimpses into the town's history and present, we learn how trapped these people are and what it will really take for Windisch to get the passports. We learn of a place where honor and dignity took a back-seat to freedom and the necessity to escape.
This is the first Muller book I've read and I will definitely be checking out others.
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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
reads like a strong historical, November 7, 2009
This review is from: The Passport (Paperback)
During the brutal reign of Ceausescu, Windisch wants out of his German village in Romania. In fact he wants out of the country that feels everywhere in his mind as the end instead of a beginning or even a middle. The coffin with the Widow Kroner's name on it symbolizes how he feels as the box remains empty waiting for her to die. Last year to gain a passport to go to West Berlin, he tried bribing the mayor with sacks of flour, but that only left him hungry. The village miller has tried using his daughter and his bitter wife, but so far has been rejected for the passport he needs to go to the west. Amalie with her crystal vase and Katharina who survived five Russian winters by selling her coat and more to make grass soup struggle in the village where women survive by sexual favors to the male elite.
This is a translation of a 1980s indictment of Ceausescu and the Communists who destroyed Romania economically and morally. To survive under the reign even in a tiny remote village, one had to bribe the leaders with whatever one had to include a pretty daughter. The cast makes the tale work while the stark grim brusque writing will stun the audience with its deep message that tyranny at any level destroys.
Harriet Klausner
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