Herta Müller's The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

 "Where does it come from, he asked, this sympathy?"

Adina is a schoolteacher in the late years of Communist Romania. Her circle of friends include Paul, a musician, and Clara, who works in a factory. Paul's band gets in trouble with the secret police because some apparatchik thinks their latest song is about the dictator Ceauşescu, and so Paul, even though he's not the lyricist, ends up in trouble dragging down Adina and the others.

Then somebody, surely the Securitate, start to invade Adina's apartment and cut off the tail and then one by one the legs of a fox fur she's sentimentally attached to. She and Paul decide to flee to a more remote part of the countryside. Do they dare to flee the country? Escapees are frequently shot at the border. 

But they're saved by the bell as it were: 1989 happens, and it's of pictures of the dead Ceauşescus that the question I opened with is asked. Sympathy is hard to imagine.

This is the second novel of Herta Müller's I've read, and the setup is somewhat similar to The Land of Green Plums, which I read earlier: a group of young people in the late years of Communist Romania, potentially intellectuals, oppressed by the secret police. Cooperate? Escape? Lie low? The Land of Green Plums takes place a few years earlier than this and there's no rescue in sight.

I thought this was good, but I was more impressed by The Land of Green Plums (1994 in German).  I felt the characters were better differentiated in that novel, which made the choices feel more poignant. This is a shorter book, only 220 pages, with fairly large margins, practically a novella in length. The opening started with quite a lot of folkloric elements: gypsies who are afraid of hares, the tooth fairy, who's a mouse in Romania, it seems:

"Mouse O mouse bring me a brand new tooth

and you can have my old one."

This felt a little odd at first, like it was more anthropological documentation than dramatically necessary, though in the end I did feel it helped set up the fairly folkloric bit about attacking Adina's fox fur. The novel got better as it went on. Still. The wisdom of the Internet suggests that The Land of Green Plums, The Appointment, and The Hunger Angel are her best works. I'll probably try one of the two of those I haven't read next, but I will try them. She's good.

Müller was born in 1953 to the German-speaking minority in Romania, got out of the country in 1987 and settled in Germany where she still lives. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.

I was (grimly) amused by this joke one of the characters tells in the novel: a Romanian who's led a bad life is whisked off to Hell after his death where he's buried up to his neck in boiling mud. Once he's settled in, he looks around and sees Nicolae Ceauşescu in the boiling mud, but only up to his shins. Our anonymous Romanian complains to the demon in charge of the boiling mud department, What's up with that? The demon replies, What can you do? He's standing on the shoulders of his wife.

This came out in German in 1992, was translated into English by Philip Boehm in 2016, and is my visit to Romania for 2023.

Herta Müller's The Land of Green Plums

Everyone had a friend in every wisp of cloud
that's how it is with friends where the world is full of fear
even my mother said, that's how it is
friends are out of the question
think of more serious things.

--Gellu Naum

This poem, or part of a poem,--I'm uncertain--serves as the epigraph to Müller's novel, but it is also quoted by the narrator and her friends at several points in the novel. Müller's novel is a story of friends in a world of fear.

Herta Müller was born in Nicolae Ceaușescu's Romania in 1953, which was certainly a world of fear. To compound problems, she was part of the German-speaking minority. She got herself in trouble with Romania's secret police, the Securitate, was mostly unable to publish, and was turfed out of her job as a technical translator. She got out to Germany in 1987. This novel appeared there in 1993, and was translated by Michael Hofmann into English in 1996.

My edition includes the speech she gave for her 2009 win of the Nobel Prize in Literature; the novel follows, it seems, pretty closely the events of her life. The narrator, too, gets out, but her friends are not necessarily so lucky. I thought it was a fairly effective presentation of a quite dark, but important story.

The prose is curiously flat. Here's an example, chosen more or less at random:

Between winter and spring I heard about five corpses that got snagged on reeds in the river outside the city. Everybody talked about them, as if they were talking about the dictator's illnesses. They shook their heads and shuddered. Kurt, too.

Michael Hofmann is a major translator, and I assume this represents the German accurately. I didn't go check, not that my German is good enough to do so. But it does feel right: something stylistically more elaborate might very well not be suitable for the subject. The narrator and the other characters are from small-town Romania; they're bright and want to get an education and move to the city, dangerous as that may be, but they are not initially sophisticated. They come across some contraband German books from Germany:

The books in the summerhouse had been smuggled into the country. They were written in German, our mother tongue, the one in which the wind lay down. Not the official language of the country. But not quite the children's bedtime language of the village either. The books were in our mother tongue, but the silence of the villages, which forbids thought, wasn't in them. We imagined the land where the books came from as a land of thinkers.

Her book brings back into German the silence of the villages.

It's the only Herta Müller I've read, so I can't compare, but I would read another. It may be a while, though. I'm not sure I can bear to read about life under maniacal fascist dictators very much just at the moment.