Wooden melons

Political change and the collapse of totalitarian regimes have re-drawn the political map of Central and Eastern Europe. Writers throughout the countries of the former Eastern Bloc actively took on their governments and exposed crimes against humanity by writing powerful, campaigning narratives. Poets and novelists succeeded in alerting the West through underground or Samizdat channels. Though it has produced masterpieces, this "literature of protest" has often raised the issue of the good versus the important. Artistic merit has at times failed to match the importance of the stories told, very often by writers drawing on their own experience.

Herta Muller, winner of this year's International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, is among the finest writers of protest. Her winning novel, The Land of Green Plums, translated by Michael Hofmann (Metropolitan Books, New York, 1996), takes place in the surreal hell of Ceausescu's Romania. She evokes a society of fear, suspicion and betrayal. It is a world she knew. A member of the German-speaking minority, Muller was born in Timis, Eastern Romania in 1953. Her opposition to the regime soon attracted the attention of the Securitate. Having refused to co-operate with it, her life became a nightmare of surveillance and threats. Eventually she was fired from her teaching job. Forced to leave the country, she emigrated to Berlin in 1987.

The Land of Green Plums (Herztier in German) was first published in Berlin in 1993. This English translation by Michael Hofmann will be published in Britain by Granta Books in July. During the last ten years Muller has won two of Germany's major literary awards, including the prestigious Ricarda-Huch, and the premier honour, the Kleist Prize. Her superb second novel, The Passport, first published in Berlin in 1986 and published in English by Serpent's Tail in 1989, prepares the reader for Muller's unique ability to appear to present her shockingly brutal testament in a terse, tongue-in-cheek, highly factual style, without melodrama. That early book is a surrealist elegy for a dying village in which the corrupt inhabitants, desperate for passports, compete against each other. In common with another outstanding European writer, the French-based Hungarian Agota Kristof, Muller is in absolute control of the raw emotion which filters through her work.

The Land of Green Plums is a miracle, a fearless human testimony which operates through the combined force of Muller's tight, understated eloquence and Hofmann's deft, atmospheric translation. It is a harsh, bleak narrative divided between a female narrator and a third-person voice - glimpses of the narrator's younger self. Whereas the adult is angry, the child is fearful, self-hating and desperate to please. The tone is tough, wry and at times blackly funny. Since they are accustomed to staring death in the face, life for her characters becomes a joke, while suicide is more trick than tragedy. There are wonderful absurdist flourishes, such as a character being sent off for three years "to teach in an industrial town where everyone made wooden melons. The wooden melons were called wood-processing industry."

Told in short, episodic sequences, the story centres on a small group of characters. Everyone has been compromised, by their friends as well as by themselves. "When we don't speak, said Edgar" - one of the main characters and the novel's prophetic observer - "we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves." Anyone, we are told, can be used as an informer, "no matter whether they served Antonescu or Hitler". In fact, the only people who have managed to break free of the situation are those who have already gone crazy: "Only the demented would not have raised their hands in the great hall. They had exchanged fear for insanity." Considering it is such a determinedly unambiguous story, clealy based on her own experiences, and that Muller uses neither metaphors nor magical realism, the novel resounds with multi-faceted symbols: the green plums are forbidden and dangerous for the citizens; they are, however, consumed with greedy abandon by the police and so become symbols of power.

Throughout the novel, the characters are hostages to their secrets. When the narrator notices Tereza, one of her friends, has a lump beneath her arm, she advises her to consult a doctor. The girl is reluctant, convinced it will disappear. Ironically, her boyfriend is a doctor, but he is so weary of treating the girl's relatives that he refuses to examine her.

When Georg, one of the core group of characters, is beaten up in the street and hospitalised, he is later issued with a medical certificate describing him as having suffered from "summer influenza with nausea". Later, six weeks after he has emigrated, Georg "lay on the pavement in Frankfurt outside the transit hostel. Six floors up was an open window." One of the narrator's casual lovers attempts to emigrate with his wife and is killed in the process. Months later she sees the official explanation for the cause of his death: "heart failure".

Muller achieves extraordinary continuity and coherence in a carefully structured, multi-layered and uncompromising work. In selecting it as the winner from a very strong shortlist, IMPAC has not only brought an original writer to a wide international audience, it has also consolidated in its third year the importance of the prize. Muller's international emergence through it should also encourage the prompt reissue of The Passport.