Herta Müller: The Land of Green Plums

Once again, the Nobel committee has nonplussed the Anglophone literary world by awarding its prize for literature to someone most of us have never heard of – although that would not include the people at Serpent's Tail, who published an early work of hers, The Passport, in 1989 – three years after it appeared in German – or Granta, who published this in 1998, five years after its German publication. (I am rather ashamed she has been off my radar; her Nobel is not as much of a bolt from the blue as JMG le Clézio's was last year.)

Whether she deserves to be called, in effect, the best writer in the world is something Anglophones don't, perhaps, have enough exposure to her work to comment on. Certainly The Passport, recently republished, is grim almost to the point of self-parody (besides the bleakness of scenery, there is a night-watchman given to gnomic utterances such as "The frogs are croaking in the mill", and you can imagine that it would be a test of one's endurance to watch a faithful cinematic version of the book).

But this is a perfectly valid way of expressing such life in art. To deal with the experience of totalitarianism would appear to demand either a talent for such poetic near-evasion or for absurdist, almost surreal comedy. For the latter, think either of Tibor Fischer's novel Under the Frog, which deals with Hungary between 1944 and the 1956 uprising (and which pulls off the extraordinary feat of being both very funny and very moving), or, more contemporaneously, the film Tales from the Golden Years, which deals with the same subject as The Land of Green Plums: life in Ceausescu's Romania.

In the film, we see a police officer wondering how to dispose of an illicit pig in such a wavy as to prevent anyone else in his apartment block from finding out; here, too, are pigs – or rather their internal organs, earned by one of the narrator's friends, Lola, in return for sexual favours, and stashed away in the furthest corner of the fridge. "The tongue would be dried out from the cold, the kidney brown and split." Still, this is considerably more upmarket than some of the meals in The Passport, where at times even grass soup is considered a desirable luxury. Later on, as the narrator prepares to leave for Germany, she finds a pig's ear sewn on to the sheet of her bed.

Unlike Tales from the Golden Years and Under the Frog, or other grimly humorous accounts of life behind the iron curtain, The Land of Green Plums is largely, but not entirely, devoid of humour. One can see why, even before you've read it. Romanians suffered probably more than anyone else, except perhaps Albanians, in terms of Eastern-bloc-style deprivation, and Ceausescu's personal style, the extravagance of his despotism, certainly didn't make things any easier to bear. Being a member of a German-speaking minority didn't help matters much – although the Romanians did side with the Nazis in the second world war. The narrator's father was in the SS, as was Müller's; this is a highly autobiographical account, to the point where you wonder how confidently you can actually declare it a work of fiction; and apparently the book itself was written in response to the news of the (possibly Securitate- organised) deaths of two of her friends – as happens here.

The prose, while simple at the level of the sentence (and we can safely assume that Hofmann's translation is very faithful to the original), is shifty, blurred, to the point where at times we are left unsure as to what exactly is going on – a deliberate flight from causation, quite understandable in a country where everyone (even, we learn, the horses) has been driven mad by fear. The mood of the novel is more important than the plot, and an air of enigma prevails throughout. References are made to the "heart-beast" that lives inside people (the original title of the novel is Herztier); what this means is left up to us to work out. As a depiction, then, of a world where you have to be very careful what you say, The Land of Green Plums works hauntingly, disturbingly well.

By Nicholas Lezard
The Guardian, Saturday 14 November 2009