Product Description

Muller takes an unflinching look at the alienation and complexity of a rapidly changing Eastern Europe, focusing on a group of young friends in Ceaucescu's Romania.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1998873 in Books
• Published on: 1996-11-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

Amazon.com Review
Like the narrator of her novel The Land of Green Plums, Herta Muller grew up a German minority in Ceausescu's Romania, which she eventually left to settle in Germany. Her own experience lends credibility to the voice of her young narrator, who inhabits a deprived police state in which minorities such as the ethnic Germans suffer persecution beyond the quotidian oppressions of Ceausescu's regime. The title refers to the young woman's observations of the swaggering policemen who wolf down plums from the city trees, even while they're still green; the act serves as a symbol of greed, arbitrary power, and stupidity. Although an element of the story is survival, achieved by clinging to the German culture and language, the novel also confronts the older characters' sympathy with the Nazis. Nevertheless, Muller's fictional heroine finds salvation, as she herself did, in modern Germany.

From Publishers Weekly
Five Romanian youths under the Ceausescu regime are the focus of this moving depiction of the struggle to become adults who keep "eyes wide open and tightly shut at the same time." Through the suicide of a mutual friend, the unnamed narrator?a young woman studying to become a translator?meets a trio of young men with whom she shares a subjugated political and philosophic rebelliousness. The jobs the state assigns them after graduation pull each to a different quadrant of the country, and this, as well as the narrator's new friendship with the daughter of a prominent Party member, strains their relations. The group manages to maintain its closeness anyway, through coded letters bearing strands of the sender's hair as a tamper-warning. As the friends begin to lose their jobs and grow weary of being followed, threatened and pulled in for semi-regular interrogations, each one thinks increasingly about escape. Terrifyingly, the narrator finds herself changing into a stranger: "someone who keeps company with misery, to make sure it stays put." Making her American debut, Muller is well-served by the workmanlike translation; though her lyrical writing falters badly at times (such as the baffling, repeated metaphor that gives the book its title), it also soars to rarefied heights. Most importantly, few books have conveyed with such clarity the convergence of terror and boredom under totalitarianism.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In this new novel by the Romanian-born Muller, winner of Germany's prestigious Kleist Prize, a young woman and four of her friends struggle to maintain some degree of normalcy during the final decay of Ceausescu's regime in Romania. Throughout, the systematic tightening of the dictator's deathgrip, which slowly squeezes out every possible private aspect of individual and family life, haunts unrelentingly. The spare, discordant writing shifts from the stark realities of the present to dreamlike fragments of the heroine's childhood and life in the country, effectively juxtaposing urban and rural, where a semblance of humanity manages to survive. In the country, Grandmother wanders through fields singing and collecting sparrow's feathers; Grandfather spends his days playing chess and visiting the barber for a haircut; and city guards and children gorge on little green plums, which the country folk say is like "swallowing your death," the soft pits "burning your heart up from the inside." Many Western readers should come to appreciate Muller, whose work recalls the writing of Croatian Slavenka Drakulic (e.g., Marble Skin, LJ 1/94). Recommended for both public and academic libraries supporting world literature.?Kathleen Marszycki, Rathbun Free Memorial Lib., Wethersfield, Ct.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

powerful, emotional and cruel novel
Be prepared to be surprised. You probably havent read anything like this before. It is very interestingly written, more like a poetry. But its not a book for everyone, its not an easy reading, where you can send your mind somewhere else. You have to be there completely. All your senses, emotions etc. This is like The Little Prince - but for adults. Herta Muller is telling us a story about living under dictatorship, halfman, halfanimal being, trying to forget about all the hopes and desires we share as humans forming a society. If you reach for the beauty, difference or something simple as love, you are condemned. Not all of us have experienced communism in this way (I am a bit too young), but this is a personal declaration about violation of human rights, being stabbed in the back, betrayed, left alone, dissapointed. Sadly, many of the things, described in this book, are true events. The book fokuses on the group of friends, that have met each other attending university. They soon reach and cross the boundaries of allowed thinking... But dont just give up if you think this is just too sad to read! It offers you a great thinking material you shouldnt avoid! It opens your horizons, sharpens your emotions. Even if you are a rock - do prepare a handkerchief for a tear or two. A book you can give to someone special in your life as a symbol of your friendship.

Beautiful... Astonishing
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.

how better it would be if i read it in original language...
this book is about some youngsters' dream of life and their disappointment. especially about friendship, the book gives us a harsh reality of what it is to grow up. those friends who experienced tragic death of their common friend, find it almost impossible to be free from the frustration after all. they are not only haunted by the intruding force of authority but also by their own past. the stories of their families are just too forceful.
also, i think the narrative style which is tossed by thoses quotes (he said, she said, ... said, etc.) not to mention, through those letters written by various characters, is fantastic. i can imagine, in original german language, it would be a lot better to be read, with the reportage-like nuance of verb endings of indirect quotation.
very eccentric and exciting novel!