Herta Müller: An eye on absurdity

Echoes of Kafka can be found throughout Herta Müller's life and work. In the 1970s she worked for three years at the Technometal tractor factory, translating into Romanian the operating manuals for machine tools imported from East Germany and Austria.

Her colleagues were both Securitate informers and the Securitate tried to recruit her too. To qualify as a translator in Ceausescu's Romania, you had to be complicit with the secret police. After she refused , the officer tasked with recruiting her said: "You'll be sorry, we'll drown you in the river."

The dictatorship fell and of course the threat did not come true, but by that time Herta, a member of Romania's German-speaking minority, had left. Like Kafka writing German in Bohemia, she left as a double outsider, a writer evoking alienation in a minority language. One surreal episode in her novel Herztier (The Land of Green Plums) describes her narrator's farewell after she has fallen under political suspicion. She lifts the cover from her bed and finds a pig's ear in the middle of the sheet. "I shook the sheet but the ear didn't move, it was sewn on in the middle like a button."

The Nobel may put Müller in a line of recent laureates who have their "minorityness" in common: Le Clézio, Jelinek, Kertész, Gao and Szymborska. The academy's social conscience may again be rather explicit.But there's no doubt Müller is as deserving a writer as she is a representative of dispossession and the autarchy of vampires that was once Romania. Her prose reacts lightly to her subject, her eloquence is precisely imaged, her sense of mischief – another echo of Kafka – to be savoured. There I think the comparison ends.

When I met her a few years ago in Berlin, she told me the story of her emigration. The hardest part had been getting used to the fact that Germany's bureaucracy was more impenetrable than Romania's. The optimist said it with a smile that was familiar with the world's absurdity, not just a single country's.