FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews The AppointmentBy Herta Müller, translated by Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm Portobello Books, 214pp. £12.99
A WOMAN IS dreading the appointment she must attend with an interrogator who plays with her. It is a grotesque ritual: he kisses her hand while squeezing her nails “so hard I could scream”. His comments are often personal, at times sexual. When she leaves her flat, which she now shares with the lover who came into her life after she divorced her husband, she tries to keep her mind on the ordeal that awaits her. But she can’t; she has too many memories, too many ghosts.
The Romanian-born, Berlin-based writer Herta Müller won last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, and no one could dispute that she is a passionate artist of protest. Her work is surrealist and vivid, and draws on her personal experience of life in Ceausescu’s Romania, losing her job as a teacher. Stalked by the Securitate, the secret police, which was intent on recruiting her as an informer, she was interrogated and threatened. Her work consistently returns to the often sexual nature of the police tactics.
The Appointmentwas written in German and originally published in Berlin in 1997, four years after The Land of Green Plums, which the poet Michael Hofmann went on to translate into English. Hofmann has said that it was the most challenging novel he has worked on.
In 1998 The Land of Green Plums, in Hofmann's translation, won the International Impac Dublin Literary Award. It is a dense, eloquent, multilayered novel of strange power, as close to Lewis Carroll as it is to Kafka. The Appointment, published in the US in this English translation in 2001, is both different and similar.
Whereas the earlier novel is divided between the writer's adult self and that of her younger self, in The Appointmentthe narrator is caught between the now, her fear for her morning summons, and the fragments of memory that relentlessly fill her thoughts. She thinks of her family and of her husband, of her lover, of herself, but most of all she thinks of her friend the beautiful and doomed Lilli.
“Lilli once said her mother no longer went to church because nowadays the masses all began with an intercession for the Head of State.” Lilli drifted from one older man to the next; each one, she believed, would finally get her out of the country and into a new life. Eventually she finds her saviour, an officer who will bring her to Canada. But their escape goes wrong; she is shot dead by a young border guard convinced his future is assured; her lover lives on.
“The worst thing,” explains the narrator, “is this feeling that my brain is slipping down into my face.” She has none of Lilli’s dazzling, dangerous beauty, but she too has dreams, and, while working in the local clothing factory, she sewed notes into the pockets of men’s suits bound for Italy.
"I'd made up my mind to marry a Westerner, and I slipped the same note into ten back pockets: Marry me, ti aspetto, signed with my name and address. The first Italian who replied would be accepted."
This is the crime for which she is arrested; the price she pays is her endless sequence of interviews with Albu, her interrogator. “I’ve been summoned. Thursday, at ten sharp,” she begins, and later adds, “I’ve been listening to the alarm clock since three in the morning ticking ten sharp, ten sharp, ten sharp.” She sees the world through the eyes of a dreamer, if one who has tried to forget but has also witnessed many horrors, only not quite enough to kill her artist’s soul.
Müller, who was born into a German-speaking minority in Timis, in eastern Romania, in 1953, sees the beauty but also hears the viciousness, particularly in the exasperated dialogue. She makes wonderful use of the tram ride to her interrogation. While sitting in the carriage she watches the other passengers, including a father and his small son. The child licks the window as the father dozes off; the narrator looks at the boy’s sandals, “dangling like little toys, as if his parents had dressed him that morning in some of his playthings”. The tram driver steers his way through the streets as if he is in command of a great ship; he becomes involved with the chatter of the passengers and reminds them not to make a mess.
Betrayal flows like a river through the narrative: men cheat on wives, sons inform on parents. She is watchful yet weary of it all. Each encounter spins into other days; her memory insists on spitting up the old hurts, such as discovering her father with a young woman.
Müller has always remained alert to the European folk tale; it dominates The Passport, her second novel, which was published in 1986 in Berlin, months before she fled there. It is an allegorical account of a village in which daily life is obsessed with flight, a feat possible only on the securing of a passport.
The Appointmentspans a day in which a life filters through one woman's thoughts. There is no denying that Müller's masterwork to date remains The Land of Green Plums. The Appointmentis sparser, a deliberate internal monologue of sorts. Both novels stand independently, yet The Appointmentalmost reads as a companion work to the earlier novel. Müller is a writer of images; reading her work transcends individual stories; you enter her world.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
