A lone voice beckoning

In awarding Herta Müller the Nobel Prize for Literature the committee has recognised a remarkable writer with a passion for protest, writes EILEEN BATTERSBY, Literary Correspondent

THERE WILL be celebration; the awarding of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature to the Romanian-born, Berlin-based Herta Müller is an exciting example of the honour being paid to a passionate artist of protest.

Müller is courageous and has summoned her surrealist imagination to brilliant effect when exposing the horrors of totalitarianism. Her finest work to date, The Land of Green Plums (Herztierin German) was first published in Berlin in 1993. Poet Michael Hofmann's magnificently atmospheric English translation followed within three years. It is a momentously important translation; here is the novel that opened the eyes of the world to the madness of Ceausescu's Romania.

The Land of Green Plumsis a multi-layered miracle of a book, albeit a terrifying one. Müller's understated, lyrical eloquence graced what is a harsh, bleak narrative shared between a female narrator and a third person voice which recalls that narrator's younger self. The adult is angry; the child is fearful, self-hating and desperate to please. The tone is tough, wry and gut wrenchingly funny yet her irony is subtle.

Since the characters are so accustomed to staring death in the face, they see life as a joke. As for suicide, it is regarded more as a trick than a tragedy. Told in brief, episodic sequences, the story centres on a small group of characters, each of whom has been compromised by their friends as well as by themselves.

“When we don’t speak” says Edgar – one of the main characters and a prophetic observer of sorts – “we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of our selves.”

He articulates the Catch-22 stalemate Müller is exploring. Anyone; everyone, she realises, has the potential to be used as an informer.

There are echoes of Kafka, at times, even of Lewis Carroll and absurdist flourishes such as a character being sent off “to teach in an industrial town where everybody made wooden melons” and all in the name of a wood- processing industry.

Following its US publication, Müller’s daring novel of symbols, such as the plums which are deemed dangerous and forbidden to the ordinary citizens yet consumed with greedy abandon by the police, caught readers whose word of mouth endorsements created a cult following.

This alone is interesting as the novel's next step was its nomination for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award. Then only in its third year, Impac's coming of age was consolidated by Müller's victory over a strong shortlist. Her novel remains along with Tahar Ben Jelloun's This Blinding Absence of Light(2004), as one of the finest books to yet win it. Müller, a quiet, tired-looking smiling woman, then 45 and sporting bright red hair, sat at a table in Dublin Castle, apologising for her English and said the book was based on her own experiences, but also on stories she had heard.

To my clumsy question of how does a person survive in a nightmare society of relentless surveillance, threats and fear, Müller, with her candid smile, shrugged “you don’t.”

She is remarkable; there is no theatre, no defiance. She is aware of the importance of the role of witness, yet she does not lose sight of the artist. Her beautiful second novel, The Passport, which was published in Berlin in 1986, months before she fled Romania, is an almost allegorical elegy of village life dominated by the need to escape. Flight is only possible through the securing of passports.

Müller uses the quality of European folk tale to brilliant effect. Set in a German village in Romania where the people dream of a different life in the West, the story is true to any country in which fantasy is the only escape from oppression.

Born in Timis, eastern Romania in 1953, Herta Müller belongs to a German-speaking minority. Becoming politicised at an early age, she learnt to speak her mind. From college she entered teaching and lost no opportunity to denounce official policies.

Her outspoken attacks on Ceausescu’s regime quickly attracted the full attention of the Securitate, the state police. Called in for questioning it was obvious she was not informer material. She had to leave and emigrated to Berlin. On winning two major German literary awards, the Kleist Prize and the Ricarda-Huch, Müller established her position as a writer with a public voice. Although writing in German, as much her first language as is her native one – Müller retains this sense of belonging to a culture within a wider culture.

Societies of fear are sustained by secrets; these secrets become burdens, a disease in themselves. In The Land of Green Plumsthe narrator notices that one of her friends has a lump under her arm and urges the girl to see a doctor.

The girl, Tereza, has no intention of seeking help, and is convinced the lump will disappear. Ironically, and this is Müller irony, Tereza’s boyfriend is a doctor. But having treated so many of her relatives, he refuses to examine her. She dies.

Elsewhere another character, Georg, having left the country, is discovered lying “on the pavement in Frankfurt outside the transit hostel. Six floors up was an open window.”

Politics and truth-telling, the courage of the witness and the weight of the message often decides the Nobel Literature Prize; in Herta Müller all of these elements are present, yet so too is the artist as the lone voice beckoning, intent on telling a story, on shaping a word picture.