Customer Reviews

Traveling on One Leg

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A short novel that tells of Irene, an emigrant who has crossed over from Romania to Germany. Not a T goes uncrossed in Muller's description of Irene's thoughs. Each flower she touches is thoroughly described and each man in her life is turned out for the reader to see his level worth in her world. As Irene waits to get her German citizenship, she travels to small towns where she meets with her lovers and carefully considers the towns and the men.

It is a book of thoughts, more than it is of action. The reader gets the feeling that it was originally written as poetry.

I enjoyed the feel of the story and how it moved along. I do not, however, think I needed it to be any longer than it was. A full length novel with the story told in this way might have been too tedious.

I was struck by the disconnectedness in this novel. Irene observes herself and her life, even as she moves through it, keeping a distance from herself as from the world around her. One thing contributing to this that is only rarely mentioned, but often present, is the wall separating her new world from her old world. It makes the separation from the old country a definite one, but one gets the feeling that this wall is also present between Irene and her adopted new homeland.

The prose style makes this feeling eminent on every page, on every paragraph. I often had to pause to contemplate this book as I was reading it. It's not a work to rush through, but very rewarding.

... one country or another, Romania or West Germany, will serve just as well for a setting of alienation and depression. I wonder if "we" haven't misperceived Herta Müller. Nearly every critic and reviewer has focused on her painful "description of what it was like to be alive anywhere in Eastern Europe during the years of communism." We readers need to pay attention also to the author's painful description of what it is like to be Herta Müller.

"Traveling on One Leg" was Müller's first novel written after her emigration from Romania to West Germany. It was completed in 1987, before the "Fall of the Wall". One should know that Müller didn't 'escape' from Romania by stealth or adventurous prowess. She left with proper papers, along with her German-speaking husband, fellow novelist Richard Wagner (sic). Unquestionably all of Müller's novels draw upon details of her own life experiences, but it would be an error to assume that all her women characters are HER in any factual manner, however much they must all be HER psychologically.

Irene, the Woman portrayed in "Traveling on One Leg", arrives in Germany in Chapter 2 and becomes a West German citizen in Chapter 19, the final chapter of the narrative. Irene comes to Germany alone, unmarried, expecting to find Franz, a much younger man with whom she'd shared a bed one night at a vacation resort in "the other country". Franz is elusive, both for Irene and to the reader; he's a narcissistic cold fish except in bed, and he plainly finds Irene's passion disconcerting and undesirable. Franz's friend Stefan meets Irene at the airport in Germany, and through Stefan Irene also meets Thomas. The three men orbit elliptically through Irene's idle life as an immigrant on welfare and through her increasingly unbalanced pysche. The reader will need to persevere with the task of sorting Irene's dreams and daydreams from any sort of mundane realities of her involvements with the three disembodied/only-bodied males, all three of whom seem to be bi-sexual and compulsively promiscuous. They're all rather repellant, at least to this reader, with the sort of glittery glamour of skin-tight snakeskin pants and caustically witty conversations. Irene herself is repellant. We meet her in "the other country", before she snares Franz, where she obsessively walks alone on the beach to encounter an exhibitionist who masturbates while she watches.

Irene's erotic fantasies are close to nasty, yet Irene is compelling as well as repellant. In material terms, she has left "the other country" with just a suitcase, but emotionally and mentally she carries enormous baggage, a trunkload of paranoia and a monstrous knapsack of anomie. For Irene, it turns out, a bureaucrat in Germany is indistinguishable from one in "the Dictator's" grim employ, and a uniform on the street is as hateful to her in Frankfurt as in Romania. The reader needs to ask: is Irene's dysfunctional socialization the result of socialism? Is her distorted, tormented personality the outcome of her life under a regime of the most brutal repression? Why, yes! Of course! But wait ... Who would she be otherwise?

As a narrative, "Traveling on One Leg" is challengingly surreal. The story is told chronologically, but in fact there is no "story". Herta Müller's German prose is thoroughly idiosyncratic, even when she bothers to separate events in time from her character's skittery poetic impressions. The effect is powerful but not easy to sort out rationally. At times, her prose reminds me of the terrifying poetry of the American Sylvia Plath. Plath blazed too brightly to live; her suicide was ineluctably her final poem. Irene also meditates suicide, but draws back, one can't fathom why. And Herta Müller herself? Who is this woman, who exposes herself so flagrantly yet conceals herself in such productive genius?

I read this book -- "Reisende auf einem Bein" -- in German while my wife read it in this English translation by Valentina Glajar and Andre Lefevre. The translation isn't perfect. There are phrases throughout that seem a lot clearer in German than the translators could make them in English. I know so because my wife confronted me with them time and again, seeking demystification. But I think the translation is good enough to 'shock and awe' the serious anglophone reader. Repellant. Compelling. Like the squeamish feeling most people unconsciously feel at the sight of a woman with one leg.

To say that Traveling on One Leg was a gloomy novel would definitely not be off the mark. But it is heavy in a good and honest way. It is rooted in the author's own life experiences and those of the Romanian citizens whom she depicts as also having transplanted themselves to other countries. Because truth is the foundation of this novel, it gives this work a heavy-hearted edge, that as a reader, is not all too easy to digest. The other Amazon reviewers, I agree, hit the mark with their assessments of this excellent novel, in essence, that it is extremely personal and that the evocative nature of loneness and disjointedness is thoroughly yet tangibly conveyed. More than a novel, the reader is almost transported into a nightmarish dream sequence, where life and living is the nightmare. It is a novel that is poetically written in a hardened verse format. The language of poetry is short, trenchant, having to pack a wallop with the fewest words available to the author; the writer has to be extremely selective in her word choice, and Herta Muller is selective, evinced by this novel that does thrust a forceful literary punch.

The story revolves around the female protagonist Irene, a transplant from the repressive country of Romania whose presidential figurehead is a ruthless, paranoid and self-absorbed dictator (Ceausescu) who espouses backward, socialist ideologies. Anyone who lives under the unfortunate umbrella of his leadership don't have much hope of living a life of freedom, individuality, prosperity and a go-at-it-alone work ethic. Hence, people try to defect, and Irene is one of those who does. Yet, her homeland is not the enemy; it is the victim. Irene is just an offshoot of the country, a tree branch connected to the trunk (the country). The disease is communism, and it is affecting every fiber of society. But when she emigrates to Germany (as Muller herself did in 1987), she is not greeted into a land of golden opportunity. She is a legalized émigré who has been uprooted from all that is familiar to her. And although she is free from the harm that communism carries, she can not relate to her new homeland, for there is no pride, no connection, nothing. She has her baggage-mentally and physically speaking-and her memories. And nothing else. She is like a newborn babe who has to start anew. However, the contaminated mother's milk of her homeland has infected her development in more ways than one. Being an isolated loner is just a tip of the iceberg.

While in Germany, she befriends three men Franz, Stefan and Thomas, all of whom seem mentally crippled in their own right. And as misery loves company, she is drawn to them for the individuality. And though their individuality is not one of an uplifting nature (individuality Irene never encountered in Romania), she is attracted to that characteristic in them regardless. As people are not automatons, for they are flesh and blood and capable of joys, sorrows and growth, she sticks with them and by them. But it is really pointless. She is like a ping pong ball going back and forth trying to find some measure of concreteness to firmly clasp onto. In a nutshell, it's hopeless with these three guys. She is in a void, a kind of limbo where all she can really do is reflect, remember and analyze: "If you would see the city from the inside, it would be different. Irene is a name of a faraway city, if you get close to it it becomes different. It's one city if you go by and don't enter it, and another if you get moved by it and don't leave it. It's one city if you come to it for the first time and another if you leave it, never to return. A different name for each." Pages 81-82. Irene escapes the daily nightmare of faux cultural, social and political assimilation when on page 144 she states: "Neither dead nor alive...It was almost joy." She literally has to be an empty vessel and not be beholden to anybody or anything in order to feel truly free. But that is next to impossible and only fleeting at best.

Traveling on One leg was a fascinating read whereby no core action (marriage, careerism, childbirth), as taken by Irene, could be specifically defined. The whole work, for me, seemed so dream-oriented. It was like a person was trying to keep the insanity that no one else (except Irene) could see or feel, at arm's length. I could almost visualize Irene waking up form a nightmare while living in Romania about what life in Germany could be like. Overall, the book was very powerful, maybe even more so than than The Appointment and The Land of Green Plums. In any event, it is a hard book that one will not easily forget. It is dreary, and yet, it makes me so grateful for my life and what I have in it. Mission accomplished!

Many (most? all?) of the novels by Herta Műller, the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, deal in one way or other with life in her native Romania and/or life as an exile in West Germany, where she emigrated in 1987. TRAVELING ON ONE LEG is no exception. First published in 1989, it is an experiential account of the flight of Irene, a young woman of about 30, to West Berlin and then her first year or so living there, through the time she is granted German citizenship. Life in Romania (identified in the novel only as "the other country") is bleak and grim, but life in West Berlin is not much better. Irene inhabits a life of profound solitariness, occasionally sharing a weekend, evening, or bed with one of three German men, but never interacting or communicating with them in any uplifting or interpersonal fashion. And no one else in Germany - neither any of her three male acquaintances or any of the other automatons she bumps into in her daily goings-on - seems to be living an interesting or satisfying life either.

Near the end of the novel, Irene says "I understood why people were unhappy in the other country. The reasons were obvious. It hurt a lot to see the reasons day in day out. * * * And here, I know there are reasons. I can't see them. It hurts not to be able to see the reasons day in day out."

I do not doubt that similar disappointment and confusion is experienced by many émigrés from the former communist states of eastern Europe. Nor do I doubt that many people often experience life as a series of disconnected episodes, some quite dreamlike or hallucinatory in nature. Nor do I doubt that some poor souls fixate inordinately on mundane objects - graffiti, a pebble in a shoe, a pubic hair in the bathtub. But such are not intrinsically the makings of a rewarding novel. To transform such meager material into literature requires, at a minimum, inspired writing and, probably, a generous dose of humor (madcap or acerbic). TRAVELING ON ONE LEG lacks any such transformative qualities. The writing is spare and stark - as flat and black-and-white as the world of Irene it so numbingly portrays.

This is the third of Műller's works of fiction that I have read in translation in the past six months. After reading one ("The Passport"), I could understand how other works of its author might conceivably warrant a Nobel Prize for Literature. Not so with either "Nadirs" or TRAVELING ON ONE LEG. To the contrary, based on them the award of the Nobel Prize to Herta Műller is somewhat bewildering. Two-and-a-half stars, rounded up to three solely because Műller is a Nobel Laureate.