Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
HERTA MÜLLER was born as part of a German-speaking minority in Romania in 1953. She attended school and university in Timisoara. After refusing to work for the Romanian Secret Service, the Securitate, she lost her job as a translator in a machine factory. In 1987, she emigrated to Germany and has lived in Berlin ever since. She writes in German and has a string of literary prizes to her name, including the Aspekte Literature Prize (1984), the Kleist Prize (1994), the Prix Aristeion (1995), the Konrad Adenauer prize for literature (2004), the Nobel Prize in Literature (2009) and the Heinrich Böll Prize from the city of Cologne (2015).Extraordinary... Muller lays bare the totalitarian attack on the individual and the everyday horror of life under a repressive regime. There is a cinematic intensity to the narrative... This ethereal, other-worldly atmosphere gradually gives way to the horrors of a more defined reality... The mounting tension made tangible by such scenes is felt most intensely in Muller's language. Short, clipped sentences accumulate, overlapping and building into a noisy, symphonic whole... A profoundly unsettling novel, which renders palpable the cruelty of life under the regime, as well as the brittle exhilarations of its overthrow
- Charlotte Ryland, TLS
Her prose - as poetic as it is blunt -works like a prism, shattering and illuminating a world that is always watching, waiting. [A] dark collage, which glints with fear - and with beauty
The Atlantic
Poetic [and] haunting... deftly rendered by Philip Boehm... In her writing, Müller inches closer to narrowing the gap between people and things, between life and language
Washington Post
When the collage is completed, the reader understands that each and every one of Müller's stories, every flight of luscious language and every brutal fact, has been necessary in depicting a society torn to pieces and tasked, with the curtains finally open and the light streaming in, with putting those pieces back together to make sense of it all
New York Times
Herta Muller fled Romania for Germany, and the lingering memories of her ex-state's oppressiveness saturate this novel. Set in the final months of Ceausescu's rule... [It's] effective at evoking a monotonous, joyless existence defined by hunters preying on hunted
- Lesley McDonald, Sunday Herald