What do you think?
Rate this book
The Appointment
From the winner of the IMPAC Award and the Nobel Prize, a fierce novel about a young Romanian woman's discovery of betrayal in the most intimate reaches of her life
"I've been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp." Thus begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceaucescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before; this time, she believes, will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. "Marry me," the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country.
As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot trying to flee to Hungary, to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them, to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers, and to Paul, her lover, her one source of trust, despite his constant drunkenness. In her distraction, she misses her stop to find herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the appointment pale by comparison.
Herta Müller pitilessly renders the humiliating terrors of a crushing regime. Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment confirms her standing as one of Europe's greatest writers.
"I've been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp." Thus begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceaucescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before; this time, she believes, will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. "Marry me," the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country.
As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot trying to flee to Hungary, to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them, to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers, and to Paul, her lover, her one source of trust, despite his constant drunkenness. In her distraction, she misses her stop to find herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the appointment pale by comparison.
Herta Müller pitilessly renders the humiliating terrors of a crushing regime. Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment confirms her standing as one of Europe's greatest writers.
214 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1997
277 people are currently reading
5739 people want to read
About the author
Herta Müller
99 books1,198 followersHerta Müller was born in Niţchidorf, Timiş County, Romania, the daughter of Swabian farmers. Her family was part of Romania's German minority and her mother was deported to a labour camp in the Soviet Union after World War II.
She read German studies and Romanian literature at Timişoara University. In 1976, Müller began working as a translator for an engineering company, but in 1979 was dismissed for her refusal to cooperate with the Securitate, the Communist regime's secret police. Initially, she made a living by teaching kindergarten and giving private German lessons.
Her first book was published in Romania (in German) in 1982, and appeared only in a censored version, as with most publications of the time.
In 1987, Müller left for Germany with her husband, novelist Richard Wagner. Over the following years she received many lectureships at universities in Germany and abroad.
In 1995 Müller was awarded membership to the German Academy for Writing and Poetry, and other positions followed. In 1997 she withdrew from the PEN centre of Germany in protest of its merge with the former German Democratic Republic branch.
The Swedish Academy awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature to Müller, "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed".
She currently resides in Berlin, Germany.
She read German studies and Romanian literature at Timişoara University. In 1976, Müller began working as a translator for an engineering company, but in 1979 was dismissed for her refusal to cooperate with the Securitate, the Communist regime's secret police. Initially, she made a living by teaching kindergarten and giving private German lessons.
Her first book was published in Romania (in German) in 1982, and appeared only in a censored version, as with most publications of the time.
In 1987, Müller left for Germany with her husband, novelist Richard Wagner. Over the following years she received many lectureships at universities in Germany and abroad.
In 1995 Müller was awarded membership to the German Academy for Writing and Poetry, and other positions followed. In 1997 she withdrew from the PEN centre of Germany in protest of its merge with the former German Democratic Republic branch.
The Swedish Academy awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature to Müller, "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed".
She currently resides in Berlin, Germany.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 597 reviews
March 3, 2022
[Edited, pictures and shelves added 3/3/22]
The heroine of this novel lives her life waiting. She is a seamstress in a Romanian factory making fine men's overcoats for export to Italy. She is so desperate for escape from her pointless life that she inserts notes saying "Marry Me," with her name and address, into the linings of the coats.
She has a live-in male friend who spends all of his time and most of her money drinking the day away. There is no future with him - it's more like having a big dog and the expense that goes with it.
This is Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall. So our heroine is in trouble again for those notes. It's happened before. Now she could lose her job or even be imprisoned. She's been summoned once more to the inspector's office - thus the book's title. The inspector is now taking a personal interest in her case - meaning he’s taking a personal interest in her.
Like other novels of Eastern Europe from this era under Communism, the work is filled with angst and anomie. And waiting. Waiting for something.
We are treated to some great prose:
"I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended--later, this disappeared and then showed up again in my mother."
"The tap water tasted of chlorine, and the chlorine tasted of the sleep I wasn't getting."
"His face froze up. Then his eyeballs glistened and turned into little squares. Out shot his arm, and he slapped me. He was better at that than he was at making coffee, tying shoelaces, or sharpening pencils."
Herta Muller (b. 1953) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. Her family was a member of Romania’s German community and she writes her novels in German. Her two best-known works on GR are The Land of Green Plums and The Hunger Angel. I have read and reviewed both of those but I still prefer The Appointment.
Top photo from letterpile.com
Sketch of the author by Jillian Tamaki in nytimes.com
The heroine of this novel lives her life waiting. She is a seamstress in a Romanian factory making fine men's overcoats for export to Italy. She is so desperate for escape from her pointless life that she inserts notes saying "Marry Me," with her name and address, into the linings of the coats.
She has a live-in male friend who spends all of his time and most of her money drinking the day away. There is no future with him - it's more like having a big dog and the expense that goes with it.
This is Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall. So our heroine is in trouble again for those notes. It's happened before. Now she could lose her job or even be imprisoned. She's been summoned once more to the inspector's office - thus the book's title. The inspector is now taking a personal interest in her case - meaning he’s taking a personal interest in her.
Like other novels of Eastern Europe from this era under Communism, the work is filled with angst and anomie. And waiting. Waiting for something.
We are treated to some great prose:
"I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended--later, this disappeared and then showed up again in my mother."
"The tap water tasted of chlorine, and the chlorine tasted of the sleep I wasn't getting."
"His face froze up. Then his eyeballs glistened and turned into little squares. Out shot his arm, and he slapped me. He was better at that than he was at making coffee, tying shoelaces, or sharpening pencils."
Herta Muller (b. 1953) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. Her family was a member of Romania’s German community and she writes her novels in German. Her two best-known works on GR are The Land of Green Plums and The Hunger Angel. I have read and reviewed both of those but I still prefer The Appointment.
Top photo from letterpile.com
Sketch of the author by Jillian Tamaki in nytimes.com
December 15, 2021
Una mujer en un viejo tranvía se dirige a su cita con un agente de seguridad. Allí se someterá a un nuevo interrogatorio por el grave delito que cometió cuando trabajaba en una fábrica de ropa: introducir papelitos en los bolsillos traseros de unos pantalones destinados a la exportación con un mensaje altamente subversivo, “Cásate conmigo”, que iba acompañado de su firma y dirección. Una mujer sin compromiso político explícito ni una elevada educación, una mujer hasta vulgar, incluso antipática, pero con un monólogo interior lírico y evocador, intenso y lleno de imágenes turbadoras, con inusuales frases de una particular y original belleza, con un discurso caótico y fragmentado, pero realmente atractivo.
“Humillación es sentirse descalza en todo el cuerpo.”En este viaje hacia el destino se mezclan dos planos, el presente, con las pequeñas incidencias de la ruta que sigue el tranvía, las relaciones entre los pasajeros, las imágenes vistas a través de la ventanilla, y el pasado, que vuelve en una serie de flashbacks desordenados para contarnos su vida hasta ese preciso momento, un momento crucial en el que ella parece haber alcanzado un límite en algún sentido, uno de esos momentos en los que el pasado se impone y obliga a la revisión de lo vivido.
“Desde que estoy citada, separo la vida de la felicidad. Cuando voy al interrogatorio, de entrada tengo que dejar en casa la felicidad. La dejo en la cara de Paul, en torno a sus ojos, a su boca, en los cañones de su barba.”En la novela, de carácter testimonial, Herta Müller nos muestra con dureza y talento el espanto de un régimen político, el de Ceausescu en Rumanía, en el que los ciudadanos viven vigilantes y vigilados, una inseguridad horrorosa que lo tiñe todo y de la que es imposible escapar ni física ni mentalmente. Esta frase lo resume a la perfección:
“No quisiera pensar en nada, porque no soy nada, excepto alguien citado.”El miedo, un miedo cotidiano y banal, que todo lo trastoca, que todo lo determina, es capaz de modificar hasta hacerlas irreconocibles e irrespirables cualquier relación -amistad, pareja, familia, vecinos o compañeros de trabajo- siendo un tremendo catalizador de las parcelas de nuestra personalidad más oscuras y vergonzosas.
(sobre la luna) “Me resultaba sospechoso que arriba, en el cielo, hubiera algo hermoso y en la tierra, abajo, no hubiera ninguna ley que prohibiese mirar a lo alto.”Mientras leía las últimas páginas de la novela iba pensando sobre cómo la autora cerraría la historia, las distintas posibilidades del final del viaje en el tranvía, del desenlace de la tan temida cita, y aun así terminé la novela medio nockeado por una resolución que me pareció abierta y en cierta manera enigmática, aunque quizás solo fue porque en realidad no quería saber cuál había sido el final, porque en realidad no quería ese final.
“El buen juicio me bastaba siempre para no herir a otros, pero nunca cuando se trataba de mi propia desdicha.”
January 4, 2022
This is the second time that I've struggled with a Herta Müller novel, the second one to leave me feeling cold and not exactly in the greatest of moods, but given the subject matter it's not surprising really. Her narrative didn't fill me with much enthusiasm, and yet, some of her sentences really were quite striking. They stood out ripe in a bowl of decaying fruit.
The Appointment takes a bleak and circuitous route through Bucharest on a rickety old tram that seems to take an eternity to reach its destination. If you had been summoned for an interview with Ceausescu's secret police in the last years of the dictatorship the last thing you would want is to be late. The narrator, a factory seamstress, has been caught sewing marriage proposals into the hems of suits bound for export, for which she gets charged with prostitution. Throughout the novel, you get the impression that any other sort of existence would have been a lot better than life in this communist state, constantly being trapped by feelings of paranoia and dread.
Romanian émigré and Nobel recipient Müller, presents the surreal absurdity of life under Ceausescu, such as an interrogator greeting her well with a gentle wet kiss on the hand before hours of interrogation, and an unexplained, severed finger turning up in her handbag - a warning or a threat? Just who can you trust? What bothered me is that it's never clear just how many times the woman has been summoned before, or whether she actually makes the final appointment. The journey from A to B is certainly a torturous one, for us just as much as the narrator, dipping in and out of her life while she is on the tram, the novel shunts back and forth in time across her memories in a haphazard manner, as she contemplates a world in which happiness has no meaning.
This is not a novel that rewards the reader in any way, but you do feel the isolation and numbness under Ceausescu rule. The Appointment is more a test of endurance than anything else. You could argue that is precisely the point, given the duress and despair Müller seeks to capture, but with heavy doses, many a reader will be tuned out before it's conclusion.
2.5 stars.
February 16, 2014
When I finally finished this remarkable work, my mind flashed back, for some obscure reason to my early twenties (such exciting years) when I loved a man, a cat and a book. Life, of course, has to develop and move on; I lost the man (our lives were taking different directions), Sylvie died in quarantine but my magnificent book was and still remains with me: the “Alexandria Quartet” by Lawrence Durrell. I’ve tried many times to write an account on why this book has had, and still continues to have, such a dramatic effect on me and I’ve always failed. That is a twentieth century masterpiece. I’ve now come across the same problem with “The Appointment”. I have so much to say but I’m having distinct difficulties in trying to achieve this. I also wish to succeed because I want everyone possible to become aware of this book and read it.
But I digress and so back to Herta Müller. This is such an incredible woman and I really don’t know where to start which rather confuses me. I’ve certainly never been lost for words before and in fact I’ve been criticized for being too verbose but then that’s my personality and I’m certainly not going to change now.
What really did surprise me is that I stumbled across a writing style that I’m only recently beginning to appreciate, the stream of consciousness monologue that James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust were early exponents of.
The story is actually rather banal and there’s not a plot as such as it is set on a single tram ride to our narrator’s increasing appointments, actually interrogations with Major Albu. She had made a simple mistake of wanting to escape from Nicolae Ceaușescu’s totalitarian regime in communist Romania. Our unnamed narrator’s crime (a seamstress working in a clothing factory) had been:
Putting handwritten notes in the back pockets of ten white linen suits being shipped to Italy that said, "Marry me" and signed with her name and address.
Various other notes had been planted which our narrator denied but Major Albu was determined to extract the truth from her come what may.
I cannot even begin to imagine what it must be like living under such conditions and in a way I can see why Ms Müller decided to leave the narrator unnamed. Indirectly and in a contradictory way she is divorcing herself from the situation by living in anonymity.
Although the tram ride takes ninety minutes, her various observations and the internal monologue they spark cover the breadth of her life. We learn about her past, her friends (Lilli in particular) and family, daily life and Romanian "expropriation" and other government officials, to name a few. All this appears in the landscape of her thoughts and memories. Although her stream of consciousness takes us to various places in time and space, there is a fairly diffuse sense of ennui and antipathy.
This book is so powerfully written. It is a veritable tour de force. It can be depressing at times, but then bounces back with black humour and comedy; interwoven with beautiful descriptions. Betrayal and lies are also imbedded within the text but it was the attention to detail which particularly impressed me; for example, the two wicker baskets to be found outside the bus her father drives. Our narrator had realized that she has left her bag there and goes to look for it. My eyes widened and I laughed at this mesmerizing description.
I kept on rereading pages and thought how did the author manage such exquisite prose when she lived under a totalitarian regime?
Colours such as red and black are other powerful motifs symbolising death and showing how little life was valued in Romania at the time.
Under their muzzles Lilli lay red as a bed of poppies.
And,
Our nameless narrator fumbled in her bag and found a small package there. It was “a finger with a bluish-black nail.
Her second husband Paul’s red Java motorbike. It was such a shame that he was a drunkard but he did give our narrator happiness for the first couple of years.
Amusing incidents stud the book, for example with melons but the part that really enthralled me was the New Year’s Eve paraputch (extended family according to her father-in-law) when our narrator recalls the celebration in her father-in-law’s house (by her first marriage).
”I’ll never know exactly what paraputch means. For me it sounds like a gang, because the family was so large and each member was shady in his own way.”
But when the celebrations get underway, it’s sheer bedlam and I revelled in it, especially Anastasia and the lascivious widower and gardener Martin who fancied his chances with the guests!
The incident that had me on tenterhooks was when our narrator cannot get off the tram at the bus station, because of an incident and because she knows that she’s going to be late for her “appointment”. When she finally gets off at the next stop she starts running and finds herself in a road where….. I had to reread this section not only one but three times. There were various interpretations here, well for me anyway, and the jury is still out on this.
Another odd thing though was that there were no quotation marks or question marks throughout the book. I wonder why our author did that.
I was also taken with the fact that Paul and our narrator lived in a “leaning tower”.
This is a very powerful, dark and moving novel. I can only describe it as depressing-brilliance and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Ms Müller justifiably deserves being a Nobel laureate. Bravo, and bravo…
But I digress and so back to Herta Müller. This is such an incredible woman and I really don’t know where to start which rather confuses me. I’ve certainly never been lost for words before and in fact I’ve been criticized for being too verbose but then that’s my personality and I’m certainly not going to change now.
What really did surprise me is that I stumbled across a writing style that I’m only recently beginning to appreciate, the stream of consciousness monologue that James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust were early exponents of.
The story is actually rather banal and there’s not a plot as such as it is set on a single tram ride to our narrator’s increasing appointments, actually interrogations with Major Albu. She had made a simple mistake of wanting to escape from Nicolae Ceaușescu’s totalitarian regime in communist Romania. Our unnamed narrator’s crime (a seamstress working in a clothing factory) had been:
Putting handwritten notes in the back pockets of ten white linen suits being shipped to Italy that said, "Marry me" and signed with her name and address.
Various other notes had been planted which our narrator denied but Major Albu was determined to extract the truth from her come what may.
I cannot even begin to imagine what it must be like living under such conditions and in a way I can see why Ms Müller decided to leave the narrator unnamed. Indirectly and in a contradictory way she is divorcing herself from the situation by living in anonymity.
Although the tram ride takes ninety minutes, her various observations and the internal monologue they spark cover the breadth of her life. We learn about her past, her friends (Lilli in particular) and family, daily life and Romanian "expropriation" and other government officials, to name a few. All this appears in the landscape of her thoughts and memories. Although her stream of consciousness takes us to various places in time and space, there is a fairly diffuse sense of ennui and antipathy.
This book is so powerfully written. It is a veritable tour de force. It can be depressing at times, but then bounces back with black humour and comedy; interwoven with beautiful descriptions. Betrayal and lies are also imbedded within the text but it was the attention to detail which particularly impressed me; for example, the two wicker baskets to be found outside the bus her father drives. Our narrator had realized that she has left her bag there and goes to look for it. My eyes widened and I laughed at this mesmerizing description.
I kept on rereading pages and thought how did the author manage such exquisite prose when she lived under a totalitarian regime?
Colours such as red and black are other powerful motifs symbolising death and showing how little life was valued in Romania at the time.
Under their muzzles Lilli lay red as a bed of poppies.
And,
Our nameless narrator fumbled in her bag and found a small package there. It was “a finger with a bluish-black nail.
Her second husband Paul’s red Java motorbike. It was such a shame that he was a drunkard but he did give our narrator happiness for the first couple of years.
Amusing incidents stud the book, for example with melons but the part that really enthralled me was the New Year’s Eve paraputch (extended family according to her father-in-law) when our narrator recalls the celebration in her father-in-law’s house (by her first marriage).
”I’ll never know exactly what paraputch means. For me it sounds like a gang, because the family was so large and each member was shady in his own way.”
But when the celebrations get underway, it’s sheer bedlam and I revelled in it, especially Anastasia and the lascivious widower and gardener Martin who fancied his chances with the guests!
The incident that had me on tenterhooks was when our narrator cannot get off the tram at the bus station, because of an incident and because she knows that she’s going to be late for her “appointment”. When she finally gets off at the next stop she starts running and finds herself in a road where….. I had to reread this section not only one but three times. There were various interpretations here, well for me anyway, and the jury is still out on this.
Another odd thing though was that there were no quotation marks or question marks throughout the book. I wonder why our author did that.
I was also taken with the fact that Paul and our narrator lived in a “leaning tower”.
This is a very powerful, dark and moving novel. I can only describe it as depressing-brilliance and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Ms Müller justifiably deserves being a Nobel laureate. Bravo, and bravo…
June 18, 2022
REZISTENȚA... EXISTENȚA
Un roman intransigent despre teroarea întreținută de Securitate în timpul comunismului și metodele de intimidare fizice și psihologice ale instituției asupra așa-zișilor dușmani ai statului. Sfoara se strânge tot mai mult în jurul personajului principal, ale cărei certitudini se pierd pe zi ce trece transformându-se tot mai mult în dubii și nesiguranță.
Ca în multe dintre romanele Hertei Müller, nimic substanțial nu se petrece: romanul acoperă călătoria protagonstei în tramvai, de acasă până la biroul maiorului Albu, cel care urmează pentru a nenumărata oară să o interogheze. Cât poate dura o astfel de cursă în tramvai în mintea unei femei care face un bilanț al vieții sale până în acel moment? Sunt zeci de gânduri care se întind pe sute de pagini.
Fiecare gând al unei proscrise într-o societate nebună devine o ocazie pentru a reflecta asupra unei situații fără ieșire, asupra unei existențe gravitând în jurul unul singur scop: acela de a nu-și pierde integritatea. De a rezista împotriva oricărei încercări de intimidare, de a rămâne fidel propriilor principii.
Pare o luptă pierdută de dinainte, și totuși, atâta timp cât există, femeia din roman continuă să reziste.
Un roman intransigent despre teroarea întreținută de Securitate în timpul comunismului și metodele de intimidare fizice și psihologice ale instituției asupra așa-zișilor dușmani ai statului. Sfoara se strânge tot mai mult în jurul personajului principal, ale cărei certitudini se pierd pe zi ce trece transformându-se tot mai mult în dubii și nesiguranță.
Ca în multe dintre romanele Hertei Müller, nimic substanțial nu se petrece: romanul acoperă călătoria protagonstei în tramvai, de acasă până la biroul maiorului Albu, cel care urmează pentru a nenumărata oară să o interogheze. Cât poate dura o astfel de cursă în tramvai în mintea unei femei care face un bilanț al vieții sale până în acel moment? Sunt zeci de gânduri care se întind pe sute de pagini.
Fiecare gând al unei proscrise într-o societate nebună devine o ocazie pentru a reflecta asupra unei situații fără ieșire, asupra unei existențe gravitând în jurul unul singur scop: acela de a nu-și pierde integritatea. De a rezista împotriva oricărei încercări de intimidare, de a rămâne fidel propriilor principii.
Pare o luptă pierdută de dinainte, și totuși, atâta timp cât există, femeia din roman continuă să reziste.
September 26, 2015
The Appointment is about life in Nicolae Ceauşescu’s communist Romania. What a simultaneously sinister and banal place. The mind won’t absorb it. The novel is in every sense a dystopia. Only in this case it happens not to be an SF fantasy but based on 20th century events. Seemingly without effort, Herta Müller shows us the utter self-defeating nature of police states, their inefficiency, rotten core, bankrupt ideology, and doomed future.
Its narrative line is elliptical. It has been written in a rich though understated style with a subtle patterning of motifs throughout. It is “story” distilled to its essentials. I suppose it might be called muscular were its anatomy not so delicately wrought. It is not chic lit. It is highly readable literary fiction, not at all cryptic, and in the end emotionally shattering. The Appointment has a fragmented narrative line. It consists of an interbraiding, if you will, of nine or ten related stories. It is not a collection of linked stories. Not at all. It is a novel.
First there is the core story of our unnamed female narrator as she takes one particular streetcar journey to an interrogation with Major Albu, her tormentor in the secret police. Both city and narrator are unnamed, as are the state’s leader and its form of government. One senses Müller wants nothing to do with politics. Around this core of the streetcar trip other stories are intertwined. These include the life and death of the beautiful Lilli and her elderly lover; the story of our narrator's involvement with a co-worker, Nelu, whom she fucks out of sheer boredom during a grim business trip and will thereafter have nothing to do with; and the story of how she meets Paul, her second husband.
Early on she does something very silly, something that would be laughable in any other context, but which the authorities consider treasonous. She writes her name and address on slips of paper along with an offer of marriage and inserts these "letters in a bottle" into the pockets of garments she knows will be shipped to men’s stores in Italy. Needless to say, the slips are found before shipping and she is denounced by the rejected Nelu.
Henceforth, she must endure periodic interrogations by the creepy Major Albu at state security, who intentionally slobbers all over her hand when “kissing” it. This is the perfect metaphor for Power’s attitude to long tradition, especially civility to women. Albu is scary but over the course of the novel we come to see how impotent he is. Moreover, we come to know what the state fears: its dissolution by unknown means. A fate it was to undergo when the democratic movement swept Eastern Europe in 1989. (One of the highlights of that period, in my view, is the videotaped execution of the old tyrant Ceauşescu and his termagant wife for crimes against the people. (See YouTube for video.)
The state’s involvement in the minutiae of its citizens’s lives never fails to astound the reader. But why? It seems to me it would be like sending your innocuous kid sister in for questioning. Why do it? Of what possible intelligence value can there be in interrogating a young woman who works in a button factory? It is done solely in the name of ideological conformity. The people of this unnamed state have nothing to be proud of. They are essentially prisoners in their own country. Lilli is shot while trying to cross the border. Her fate becomes hortatory propaganda. There is no cultural life to speak of, no artistic expression. Romania under Ceauşescu makes Orwell’s 1984 look like a fun day spent at Six Flags Great Adventure.
Very striking is the consistent preference throughout of young women for old men. Young men are — no, not those on whom all hopes and dreams for the future are placed — but a thoroughly disenfranchised lot, without opportunity, almost invisible. Paul is the group’s lone representative for the duration of the book, except for one scene set in an Officers Club. Here the emasculated young men sit at tables ogling Lilli and her old man and tossing matchheads at them. Right or wrong, I saw the matchheads as symbols of forestalled ignition, quashed passion.
The narrator’s Inexplicable first marriage is to the son of the Perfumed Commissar, once head of state expropriation, who not only took every scrap of property her grandparents owned, but then sent them to a hellish “camp,” a gulag essentially, where the grandmother promptly died, reduced to geophagy.
This is a very powerful, very dark novel. I recommended it highly. However, if you are new to Herta Müller's work I would advise you to start with the even more remarkable In the Land of Green Plums.
Its narrative line is elliptical. It has been written in a rich though understated style with a subtle patterning of motifs throughout. It is “story” distilled to its essentials. I suppose it might be called muscular were its anatomy not so delicately wrought. It is not chic lit. It is highly readable literary fiction, not at all cryptic, and in the end emotionally shattering. The Appointment has a fragmented narrative line. It consists of an interbraiding, if you will, of nine or ten related stories. It is not a collection of linked stories. Not at all. It is a novel.
First there is the core story of our unnamed female narrator as she takes one particular streetcar journey to an interrogation with Major Albu, her tormentor in the secret police. Both city and narrator are unnamed, as are the state’s leader and its form of government. One senses Müller wants nothing to do with politics. Around this core of the streetcar trip other stories are intertwined. These include the life and death of the beautiful Lilli and her elderly lover; the story of our narrator's involvement with a co-worker, Nelu, whom she fucks out of sheer boredom during a grim business trip and will thereafter have nothing to do with; and the story of how she meets Paul, her second husband.
Early on she does something very silly, something that would be laughable in any other context, but which the authorities consider treasonous. She writes her name and address on slips of paper along with an offer of marriage and inserts these "letters in a bottle" into the pockets of garments she knows will be shipped to men’s stores in Italy. Needless to say, the slips are found before shipping and she is denounced by the rejected Nelu.
Henceforth, she must endure periodic interrogations by the creepy Major Albu at state security, who intentionally slobbers all over her hand when “kissing” it. This is the perfect metaphor for Power’s attitude to long tradition, especially civility to women. Albu is scary but over the course of the novel we come to see how impotent he is. Moreover, we come to know what the state fears: its dissolution by unknown means. A fate it was to undergo when the democratic movement swept Eastern Europe in 1989. (One of the highlights of that period, in my view, is the videotaped execution of the old tyrant Ceauşescu and his termagant wife for crimes against the people. (See YouTube for video.)
The state’s involvement in the minutiae of its citizens’s lives never fails to astound the reader. But why? It seems to me it would be like sending your innocuous kid sister in for questioning. Why do it? Of what possible intelligence value can there be in interrogating a young woman who works in a button factory? It is done solely in the name of ideological conformity. The people of this unnamed state have nothing to be proud of. They are essentially prisoners in their own country. Lilli is shot while trying to cross the border. Her fate becomes hortatory propaganda. There is no cultural life to speak of, no artistic expression. Romania under Ceauşescu makes Orwell’s 1984 look like a fun day spent at Six Flags Great Adventure.
Very striking is the consistent preference throughout of young women for old men. Young men are — no, not those on whom all hopes and dreams for the future are placed — but a thoroughly disenfranchised lot, without opportunity, almost invisible. Paul is the group’s lone representative for the duration of the book, except for one scene set in an Officers Club. Here the emasculated young men sit at tables ogling Lilli and her old man and tossing matchheads at them. Right or wrong, I saw the matchheads as symbols of forestalled ignition, quashed passion.
The narrator’s Inexplicable first marriage is to the son of the Perfumed Commissar, once head of state expropriation, who not only took every scrap of property her grandparents owned, but then sent them to a hellish “camp,” a gulag essentially, where the grandmother promptly died, reduced to geophagy.
This is a very powerful, very dark novel. I recommended it highly. However, if you are new to Herta Müller's work I would advise you to start with the even more remarkable In the Land of Green Plums.
December 15, 2019
Es gibt Momente beim Lesen, da beneide ich die bildende Kunst. Man stellt sich in einem Museum vor ein expressionistisches Gemälde, sieht die vielen grauen dicken Pinselstriche mit dem roten Fleck in der Mitte, undefinierbar in der Aussage, nichtssagend in der Ästhetik, stellt man eine gewisse triste Atmosphäre fest und ist sich sicher, so etwas nicht in seiner Wohnung haben zu wollen und geht dann nach 12 Sekunden zum nächsten Bild. In Herta Müllers Buch dauert die Betrachtungsphase bestimmt rund sechs Stunden. Das zieht sich. Schön ist das nicht. Ist halt Kunst. Prämiert vom Nobelpreiskomitee. Ich kann darauf verzichten und denke, dass das mit mir und Frau Müller nichts mehr wird. Beispiel gefällig:
„Von weitem kam Gebell und dann Geschrei. Lillis Offizier wurde gefesselt, in eine Blechhütte geführt und bewacht von dem Glückserpichten, der geschossen hatte. Lilli blieb liegen. Die Hütte hatte keine Vorderwand. Auf dem Boden stand eine Wasserzisterne, an der Wand eine Bank, in der Ecke eine Tragbahre. Der Bewacher trank viel Wasser, wusch sein Gesicht, zog das Hemd aus der Hose und wischte sich ab und setzte sich. Der Gefesselte durfte nicht sitzen, aber hinaus ins Gras schauen, wo Lilli lag, durfte er. Fünf Hunde liefen, das Gras stand ihnen bis zum Hals, ihre Beine flogen darüber. Und weit hinter ihnen rannte eine Schar abgehetzter Soldaten. Bis sie bei Lilli ankamen, war nicht nur ihr Kleid in Fetzen gerissen. Die Hunde räumten Lillis Körper aus. Unter ihren Schnauzen lag Lilli so rot wie ein ganzes Beet Klatschmohn. Die Soldaten trieben die Hunde weg und stellten sich in den Kreis. Dann kamen zwei in die Hütte, tranken Wasser und nahmen die Tragbahre mit. Das erzählte mir Lillis Stiefvater. Wie ein ganzes Beet Klatschmohn, sagte er, ich dachte in dem Moment an Kirschen.
Hier kann man sehr gut die vielen Grautöne erkennen und dann der rote Fleck, ein Hauch von Klatschmohn, reflektiert mit der Kirsche. Der Mohn als Symbol des Friedens? Die Kirsche als Symbol für die Süße des Lebens? Oder der Wunsch nach den Tod? Ehrlich gesagt, mir ist es egal. Ich mag diese Art von Stakkatosätze nicht, die in ihrer Schlichtheit die Trostlosigkeit in dem von der Diktatur geknechteten Rumänien verdeutlichen sollen. In „Niederungen“ schreibt Herta Müller noch mit ihrer eigenen Erzählstimme, was ganz angenehm zu lesen war. Autobiografisch ist ja eigentlich alles, was sie schreibt. Nur in dem vorliegenden Buch lässt sie die Geschichte von einer (sprachlich eingeschränkten) einfachen Frau erzählen, die auf dem Weg zum regelmäßig wiederkehrenden Verhör sitzt. Wie gesagt, dass mag authentisch sein, aber Gefallen finde ich daran nicht. Leider spielen die Gedanken an die Konfrontation mit dem Staatsapparat keine große Rolle. Vielmehr ist das Buch von Erinnerungen an Kindheit, Jugend und Ehe geprägt. Das hatte ich mir auch anders vorgestellt.
„Von weitem kam Gebell und dann Geschrei. Lillis Offizier wurde gefesselt, in eine Blechhütte geführt und bewacht von dem Glückserpichten, der geschossen hatte. Lilli blieb liegen. Die Hütte hatte keine Vorderwand. Auf dem Boden stand eine Wasserzisterne, an der Wand eine Bank, in der Ecke eine Tragbahre. Der Bewacher trank viel Wasser, wusch sein Gesicht, zog das Hemd aus der Hose und wischte sich ab und setzte sich. Der Gefesselte durfte nicht sitzen, aber hinaus ins Gras schauen, wo Lilli lag, durfte er. Fünf Hunde liefen, das Gras stand ihnen bis zum Hals, ihre Beine flogen darüber. Und weit hinter ihnen rannte eine Schar abgehetzter Soldaten. Bis sie bei Lilli ankamen, war nicht nur ihr Kleid in Fetzen gerissen. Die Hunde räumten Lillis Körper aus. Unter ihren Schnauzen lag Lilli so rot wie ein ganzes Beet Klatschmohn. Die Soldaten trieben die Hunde weg und stellten sich in den Kreis. Dann kamen zwei in die Hütte, tranken Wasser und nahmen die Tragbahre mit. Das erzählte mir Lillis Stiefvater. Wie ein ganzes Beet Klatschmohn, sagte er, ich dachte in dem Moment an Kirschen.
Hier kann man sehr gut die vielen Grautöne erkennen und dann der rote Fleck, ein Hauch von Klatschmohn, reflektiert mit der Kirsche. Der Mohn als Symbol des Friedens? Die Kirsche als Symbol für die Süße des Lebens? Oder der Wunsch nach den Tod? Ehrlich gesagt, mir ist es egal. Ich mag diese Art von Stakkatosätze nicht, die in ihrer Schlichtheit die Trostlosigkeit in dem von der Diktatur geknechteten Rumänien verdeutlichen sollen. In „Niederungen“ schreibt Herta Müller noch mit ihrer eigenen Erzählstimme, was ganz angenehm zu lesen war. Autobiografisch ist ja eigentlich alles, was sie schreibt. Nur in dem vorliegenden Buch lässt sie die Geschichte von einer (sprachlich eingeschränkten) einfachen Frau erzählen, die auf dem Weg zum regelmäßig wiederkehrenden Verhör sitzt. Wie gesagt, dass mag authentisch sein, aber Gefallen finde ich daran nicht. Leider spielen die Gedanken an die Konfrontation mit dem Staatsapparat keine große Rolle. Vielmehr ist das Buch von Erinnerungen an Kindheit, Jugend und Ehe geprägt. Das hatte ich mir auch anders vorgestellt.
March 24, 2017
There is a shocking matter of factness in the voice addressing to the readers of this book. Belonging to the female character in the center of the story, it weaves the narration by adding together episodes full of horror from a past under communism (her grandmother's death, her father's adultery, her father-in-law's acts of violence, Lilli's sexual misbehavior and death), details regarding a present ride by tram to the police office for interrogations and random descriptions of objects.
How is it to feel that everything surrounding you is spying on you? Innanimate objects get personified around and these, together with people surrounding you (among whom most act crazy if they are not crazy already) seem to take part in a conspiratory whirlpool which has in the center your life. Everything becomes part of this cycle and the repetition and dullness of everyday events scare the hell out of you. Everything seems to be an enemy, everyone and everything seem to be plotting against you, even the lifeless objects in their silence seem to whisper against you. Everything suggests the feeling that someone is watching you and is going to inform on you to the secret police under the Romanian communist regime led by Ceausescu. Stricken with constant fear and with the feeling that senselessness is easier to handle than the aimlessness of the everyday events, the main character constantly gives an answer to the question pointed above which Herta Muller seems to make a whole theme out of in this book ("How is it to feel that everything surrounding you is spying on you?"). The sessions of interrogations and her fear of being summoned become the major events of her present summing up a centerfold around which her whole life revolves.
In such an atmosphere, it becomes impossible to grasp who you are anymore and what your principles really are: "it's easy to talk about bad years if they are past. But when you have to say right who you are at this very moment, it's hard to get more out than an uneasy silence". Everybody informs on everybody and trust becomes a liability: trusting means getting betrayed eventually. The past brings up its examples of this statement: people who should be trusted in life, in general, are actually great deceivers in the main character's life (her father, her step-father) and the ones that she actually trusts have however, an uncertain status. I can only interpret the open-ending taking this last phrase into account: everything is uncertain (is Paul an enemy or a friend, does he love her or does he mislead her, does he tell her the truth or everything regarding him is a big lie?) and the character doesn't know whom she can trust anymore. "The trick is not to go mad." But how can you keep your mind in its right place when you are estranged in a world where values are fighting to convey a meaning that is totally opposite to the main one and everyone seems to consider this normal? How are you to fight with mad people in a world where everybody is mad and you are the only one who is different?
The result is that in such a world you begin to become suspicious of everyone and value things which in normal societies you would take for granted: the fact that your body is whole and that all its parts are functional, that you have all the fingers, for instance, and that you can use them: "Ever since I found the parcel wrapped like candy in my bag (she talks about a human finger she found in her bag after one of the sessions of interrogation), I use my forefinger (when she is making sketches), crooking and twisting it to follow the contours. I didn't check whether the severed finger could be bent."
This book is splendid: full of meanings and conveying ideas without pointing them out. I relished its phrases and I read the most striking ones twice or even more times. They kept me pondering about the obscurity of communism and on how the terror turned people into beasts. They made me wonder if I had any right to blame nowadays people for still wearing their scars of the communism as they still do and this question will keep me wondering for quite a while.
On another note, I really enjoyed the review from the link below, although I don't agree with the ending:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/21/boo...
How is it to feel that everything surrounding you is spying on you? Innanimate objects get personified around and these, together with people surrounding you (among whom most act crazy if they are not crazy already) seem to take part in a conspiratory whirlpool which has in the center your life. Everything becomes part of this cycle and the repetition and dullness of everyday events scare the hell out of you. Everything seems to be an enemy, everyone and everything seem to be plotting against you, even the lifeless objects in their silence seem to whisper against you. Everything suggests the feeling that someone is watching you and is going to inform on you to the secret police under the Romanian communist regime led by Ceausescu. Stricken with constant fear and with the feeling that senselessness is easier to handle than the aimlessness of the everyday events, the main character constantly gives an answer to the question pointed above which Herta Muller seems to make a whole theme out of in this book ("How is it to feel that everything surrounding you is spying on you?"). The sessions of interrogations and her fear of being summoned become the major events of her present summing up a centerfold around which her whole life revolves.
In such an atmosphere, it becomes impossible to grasp who you are anymore and what your principles really are: "it's easy to talk about bad years if they are past. But when you have to say right who you are at this very moment, it's hard to get more out than an uneasy silence". Everybody informs on everybody and trust becomes a liability: trusting means getting betrayed eventually. The past brings up its examples of this statement: people who should be trusted in life, in general, are actually great deceivers in the main character's life (her father, her step-father) and the ones that she actually trusts have however, an uncertain status. I can only interpret the open-ending taking this last phrase into account: everything is uncertain (is Paul an enemy or a friend, does he love her or does he mislead her, does he tell her the truth or everything regarding him is a big lie?) and the character doesn't know whom she can trust anymore. "The trick is not to go mad." But how can you keep your mind in its right place when you are estranged in a world where values are fighting to convey a meaning that is totally opposite to the main one and everyone seems to consider this normal? How are you to fight with mad people in a world where everybody is mad and you are the only one who is different?
The result is that in such a world you begin to become suspicious of everyone and value things which in normal societies you would take for granted: the fact that your body is whole and that all its parts are functional, that you have all the fingers, for instance, and that you can use them: "Ever since I found the parcel wrapped like candy in my bag (she talks about a human finger she found in her bag after one of the sessions of interrogation), I use my forefinger (when she is making sketches), crooking and twisting it to follow the contours. I didn't check whether the severed finger could be bent."
This book is splendid: full of meanings and conveying ideas without pointing them out. I relished its phrases and I read the most striking ones twice or even more times. They kept me pondering about the obscurity of communism and on how the terror turned people into beasts. They made me wonder if I had any right to blame nowadays people for still wearing their scars of the communism as they still do and this question will keep me wondering for quite a while.
On another note, I really enjoyed the review from the link below, although I don't agree with the ending:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/21/boo...
November 29, 2024
“First look left and then look right, son, to see if a car’s coming. That’s important when you’re crossing the street but it’s a dangerous way to think.”
This is the kind of book literary prizes are made for. For that moment 30 pages in when nothing quite makes sense and you find yourself wondering, “is this just... pointless, pretentious drivel? Okay... but she won the Nobel for Christ’s sake, give it a chance!” And indeed—
Give it a chance. Because there are great writers, and then there are human beings whose relationship with words is on another plane entirely. And sometimes, such a wordmagician slips their gift into their back pocket and sets out into the world to explain the unexplainable. Sometimes, they come close to writing the world as it is, and not as it is understood. Dreams as they are lived, not as they are written. Hearts as they beat, not as they are dreamt. Sometimes, such a poet-mage sends back a dispatch from the real not otherwise to be comprehended, except in the ordinary course of living—the routine poetry of daily life, against which most of us are constantly at war, because if we let ourselves feel, with any regularity, those impossible ordinary moments slipping through our fingers, the pain would be too much to bear.
“There are people who distinguish not only between objects and thoughts, but also between thoughts and feelings. I wonder how.”
And whatever such a sorcerer might have to say about state violence, or political complicity, or sexual paranoia, is just the inevitable result of their own particular universal nightmares, which we do and do not share.
This is the kind of book literary prizes are made for. For that moment 30 pages in when nothing quite makes sense and you find yourself wondering, “is this just... pointless, pretentious drivel? Okay... but she won the Nobel for Christ’s sake, give it a chance!” And indeed—
Give it a chance. Because there are great writers, and then there are human beings whose relationship with words is on another plane entirely. And sometimes, such a wordmagician slips their gift into their back pocket and sets out into the world to explain the unexplainable. Sometimes, they come close to writing the world as it is, and not as it is understood. Dreams as they are lived, not as they are written. Hearts as they beat, not as they are dreamt. Sometimes, such a poet-mage sends back a dispatch from the real not otherwise to be comprehended, except in the ordinary course of living—the routine poetry of daily life, against which most of us are constantly at war, because if we let ourselves feel, with any regularity, those impossible ordinary moments slipping through our fingers, the pain would be too much to bear.
“There are people who distinguish not only between objects and thoughts, but also between thoughts and feelings. I wonder how.”
And whatever such a sorcerer might have to say about state violence, or political complicity, or sexual paranoia, is just the inevitable result of their own particular universal nightmares, which we do and do not share.
October 29, 2022
No es una novela accesible o de lectura ligera, no posee una estructura clara, no tiene un conflicto o resolución y demanda una verdadera atención del lector para alcanzar su comprensión pero sabe, en última instancia, cómo recompensar a los que aún así se aventuren en ella.
Su protagonista es citada, durante la dictadura de Ceausescu, por coser papelitos en el interior de abrigos que serían exportados con la esperanza de conseguir un marido italiano que la ayude a huir del régimen totalitarista dictatorial del que se ve presa. La autora explora no sólo la tensión punzante y agobiante de las citaciones sino también el rol del hombre y la mujer en una sociedad oprimida y opresora y el peso de la memoria de los que ya no están.
En medio de un contexto que pretende desmantelar toda autonomía, esperanza y autenticidad, su protagonista se aferra a los recuerdos, al análisis de lo ordinario y a un intento de comprensión de lo extraordinario para mantenerse unida a sí misma aunque las fuerzas originadas desde todos los ángulos intenten despedazarla. En este aspecto es innegable la habilidad de Müller para la introspección y para crear un sólido retrato de los regímenes políticos y los vínculos humanos.
Su protagonista es citada, durante la dictadura de Ceausescu, por coser papelitos en el interior de abrigos que serían exportados con la esperanza de conseguir un marido italiano que la ayude a huir del régimen totalitarista dictatorial del que se ve presa. La autora explora no sólo la tensión punzante y agobiante de las citaciones sino también el rol del hombre y la mujer en una sociedad oprimida y opresora y el peso de la memoria de los que ya no están.
En medio de un contexto que pretende desmantelar toda autonomía, esperanza y autenticidad, su protagonista se aferra a los recuerdos, al análisis de lo ordinario y a un intento de comprensión de lo extraordinario para mantenerse unida a sí misma aunque las fuerzas originadas desde todos los ángulos intenten despedazarla. En este aspecto es innegable la habilidad de Müller para la introspección y para crear un sólido retrato de los regímenes políticos y los vínculos humanos.
December 17, 2015
Everything happened in a twinkling, the time it takes for one person to assault another.Müller's Nobel Prize speech is transcribed at the end of this edition, a bonus the cover did not hint at that other editions could learn from, and among other thought provoking paragraphs was her probing the susceptibility of engineers and the like to making homunculi out of their creations. I already knew a number of beautiful words having to do with lubricated hydraulic machine parts: DOVETAIL, GOOSENECK, ACORN NUTS, and EYEBOLTS, she says, and so I left off characterizing her plot structure as the shuttering swift sidings of looms and thought of maelstroms instead. Capturing the linear side of things is all very well, but we are no Arachne in our weaving and wiggling our way out of the unyielding desire of the eye.
You feel fine because you’ve forgotten what that means for other people.The Wiki page for the author already rhapsodized on about Kafka, so I'll save us both some ethos and think instead on past and future. If you let it, the narrative will explain all that needs be expounded, letting even a novice in Romanian tinged literature such as myself into its endless bowels. When the final page is turned, you'll have the comfort of your narrator's closure, for you'll know exactly how she came to be here and where she has utmost need to go. Whether you accept the lines drawn by death and madness by that point is another matter entirely.
On the way I thought: How bizarre that something so beautiful could be up in the sky, with no law down here on earth forbidding people to look at it.The matter of her being a woman may be a turnoff to some, for the cruelty aimed so casually and frequently at female bodies is the same regardless of political leanings, souring those feel good leavings that horror stories of Communism inevitably leave on the democratically inclined. It's not nearly as difficult as Morrison and Jelinek, but it is said, and unlike the others dwells on many a tale of daughters fucking fathers (note the order and implicated position) and other sundry tales of female lust, so maybe there is something to be said about that Communism business in conjunction with the patriarchy. Or not, but whether 'twas meaning or null, it was worth noting, for superstitious warding off harm before the next appointment share with a sought out sex an ultimate need for control.
First look left and then look right, son, to see if a car's coming. That's important when you're crossing a street but it's a dangerous way to think.Hell hath no fury like a man offended.
May 14, 2018
4,5 stars, but taking into account my mental state in the last months, it surely deserves being rounded up to 5. Müller mixes present and past throughout the whole book and manages to get it superbly done, never sounding pretentious or false, and meanwhile tells some pretty good stories from Communist Romania.
July 31, 2018
This is certainly autobiographical: at least in regard to the interrogations part. Herta was in fact interrogated while living in Romania, under Ceausescu.
This is the daily (grim and perceptive) description of a woman’s life; her apprehension facing the interrogations.
She’s a factory worker. During her first marriage (while husband was at the military service) she recalls she escaped home and went to the mountains (Carpatos mountains) with conservatory finalists; she saw a frozen lake and crosses of the dead; her peers picked up stones for healing but she picked a stone in the form of child’s foot; she still keeps it.
She’s been summoned to an interrogation at 10:00 a.m., sharp:”interrogations are a torment”….”they are so long”…”one feels lost”... “Today I may be conducted to a prison cell, escorted by Albu major.” Albu's head stinks French perfume “Avril”.
In her dark bedroom she wonders how to kill time; she cannot sleep; “it’s easier to think about something luminous, snow…”.
…She names her blouses. Her second husband (Paul) is a drunken man:”I drink because it tastes good”. She wonders: you think with your tongue. People at that time drank a lot. The factory worker dedicates some analysis to the drinking habit: lots of people drinking “Two Plums” brand. There are so many plum trees.
…
Herta Müller belonged to the German minority living in Romania where she was born (1953). She had a bad experience under the dictator of Romania -she was under constant interrogation by the Securitate-the Romanian secret services. Her own father didn’t speak about once belonging to the German SS; that was a taboo theme. Her mother went to a labor camp in the Soviet Union.
The writer remembers that people “starved to death”….and she got “physically disgusted”.
Herta studied German literature.
In another book of Herta (”Nadirs”) she depicts the dreadful life of a small village back in Romania.
And then freedom: in 1987 she moved to West Berlin; she was amazed, even shocked: everything colorful…;
she wrote “Travel in one leg”, the novel approaching this transition. At 56 years of age she received the Nobel Prize of literature.
Her own terrible experience made her one sharp political analyst; see her article on
Liao Yiwu.
http://www.signandsight.com/features/...
This is the daily (grim and perceptive) description of a woman’s life; her apprehension facing the interrogations.
She’s a factory worker. During her first marriage (while husband was at the military service) she recalls she escaped home and went to the mountains (Carpatos mountains) with conservatory finalists; she saw a frozen lake and crosses of the dead; her peers picked up stones for healing but she picked a stone in the form of child’s foot; she still keeps it.
She’s been summoned to an interrogation at 10:00 a.m., sharp:”interrogations are a torment”….”they are so long”…”one feels lost”... “Today I may be conducted to a prison cell, escorted by Albu major.” Albu's head stinks French perfume “Avril”.
In her dark bedroom she wonders how to kill time; she cannot sleep; “it’s easier to think about something luminous, snow…”.
…She names her blouses. Her second husband (Paul) is a drunken man:”I drink because it tastes good”. She wonders: you think with your tongue. People at that time drank a lot. The factory worker dedicates some analysis to the drinking habit: lots of people drinking “Two Plums” brand. There are so many plum trees.
…
Herta Müller belonged to the German minority living in Romania where she was born (1953). She had a bad experience under the dictator of Romania -she was under constant interrogation by the Securitate-the Romanian secret services. Her own father didn’t speak about once belonging to the German SS; that was a taboo theme. Her mother went to a labor camp in the Soviet Union.
The writer remembers that people “starved to death”….and she got “physically disgusted”.
Herta studied German literature.
In another book of Herta (”Nadirs”) she depicts the dreadful life of a small village back in Romania.
And then freedom: in 1987 she moved to West Berlin; she was amazed, even shocked: everything colorful…;
she wrote “Travel in one leg”, the novel approaching this transition. At 56 years of age she received the Nobel Prize of literature.
Her own terrible experience made her one sharp political analyst; see her article on
Liao Yiwu.
http://www.signandsight.com/features/...
December 16, 2022
Uzun uzun yazabileceğim çok şey yok Keşke Bugün Kendimle Karşılaşmasaydım'la ilgili. Daha yirminci sayfasında kitabın benim için yazılmadığını, hedef okur kitlesi içinde olmadığımı fark etmiştim zaten. Normalde sevmeyeceğimi bu kadar erken anladığım bir kitabı çok vakit harcamadan yarım bırakırdım ancak hem kitap kulübünde konuşacağımız için hem de en azından yazarın dili beni çok zorlamadığı için ittire kaktıra da olsa bitirebildim.
Neden sevmedim peki, en büyük sebebi sanırım kitabın -benim için- sıkıcı olması. Anlaması zor bir anlatımdan ya da hikayenin monotonluğundan bahsetmiyorum, genel olarak okuma eylemini keyifsiz hale getiren bir sıkıcılığı var romanın. Oysaki hikaye ilgi çekici sayılır, Çavuşesku Romanya'sında sürekli sorguya çağrılan bir kadının yine sorguya giderken yaptığı bir tramvay yolculuğunda sürekli geçmişe dönüp bir şeyleri hatırlamasını okuyoruz. Fakat bu geriye dönüşleri takip etmek zor, anlatıcının anlattığı hangi olay diğerinden önce yaşanmış çoğu zaman anlamadım. Daha da önemlisi bu olayların bir çoğunun kitabın o büyük hikayesine ne kattığını, bunları neden okuduğumuzu anlamadım. Dolayısıyla da okurken sıkıldım.
Sevdiğim ufak tefek tarafları var aslında. Ama yazarın bir başka eserini daha okuyacağımı sanmıyorum açıkçası.
Neden sevmedim peki, en büyük sebebi sanırım kitabın -benim için- sıkıcı olması. Anlaması zor bir anlatımdan ya da hikayenin monotonluğundan bahsetmiyorum, genel olarak okuma eylemini keyifsiz hale getiren bir sıkıcılığı var romanın. Oysaki hikaye ilgi çekici sayılır, Çavuşesku Romanya'sında sürekli sorguya çağrılan bir kadının yine sorguya giderken yaptığı bir tramvay yolculuğunda sürekli geçmişe dönüp bir şeyleri hatırlamasını okuyoruz. Fakat bu geriye dönüşleri takip etmek zor, anlatıcının anlattığı hangi olay diğerinden önce yaşanmış çoğu zaman anlamadım. Daha da önemlisi bu olayların bir çoğunun kitabın o büyük hikayesine ne kattığını, bunları neden okuduğumuzu anlamadım. Dolayısıyla da okurken sıkıldım.
Sevdiğim ufak tefek tarafları var aslında. Ama yazarın bir başka eserini daha okuyacağımı sanmıyorum açıkçası.
Read
March 24, 2023DNF
Read almost 50% of the book
I'm not sure if the translation was lacking or it was the writer's style, but I couldn't keep up with the narrator's jumbled and senseless inner thoughts.
An excerpt:
The driver reaches for the second crescent roll, then hesitates and takes a swig from his bottle. Why is he drinking before he eats. The giant blue mailbox is in front of the post office, how many letters can it take. If it were up to me to fill it, it would never have to be emptied. Since the notes meant for Italy, I haven’t written to a soul—just told someone something now and then: you have to talk, but you don’t have to write. The driver is munching away at his second roll, it must have dried out a little, judging by the crumbs. Outside, the father carries the sleeping boy across the middle of the street, where there isn’t a safe crossing. If a car comes now he won’t make it. How’s he supposed to run carrying a child, and a sleeping child at that. Maybe he checked to make sure there was nothing coming before he crossed. But he’d have to look over the boy’s head to see what might be coming from the right, and he could easily miss something. If there’s an accident, it’ll be his fault...If the boy doesn’t wake up, he’ll put him in the mail. An old woman sticks her head in the open door and asks: Does this tram go to the market. Why don’t you read what’s on the sign, the driver says. I’m not wearing my glasses, she says. Well, we just go and follow our nose and if that takes us to the market then we’ll get there. The old woman gets in, and the driver starts up. A young man takes a running jump on board. He’s panting so loud it takes my breath away...
The whole book is like this. There are no chapters; no separation.
Read almost 50% of the book
I'm not sure if the translation was lacking or it was the writer's style, but I couldn't keep up with the narrator's jumbled and senseless inner thoughts.
An excerpt:
The driver reaches for the second crescent roll, then hesitates and takes a swig from his bottle. Why is he drinking before he eats. The giant blue mailbox is in front of the post office, how many letters can it take. If it were up to me to fill it, it would never have to be emptied. Since the notes meant for Italy, I haven’t written to a soul—just told someone something now and then: you have to talk, but you don’t have to write. The driver is munching away at his second roll, it must have dried out a little, judging by the crumbs. Outside, the father carries the sleeping boy across the middle of the street, where there isn’t a safe crossing. If a car comes now he won’t make it. How’s he supposed to run carrying a child, and a sleeping child at that. Maybe he checked to make sure there was nothing coming before he crossed. But he’d have to look over the boy’s head to see what might be coming from the right, and he could easily miss something. If there’s an accident, it’ll be his fault...If the boy doesn’t wake up, he’ll put him in the mail. An old woman sticks her head in the open door and asks: Does this tram go to the market. Why don’t you read what’s on the sign, the driver says. I’m not wearing my glasses, she says. Well, we just go and follow our nose and if that takes us to the market then we’ll get there. The old woman gets in, and the driver starts up. A young man takes a running jump on board. He’s panting so loud it takes my breath away...
The whole book is like this. There are no chapters; no separation.
September 28, 2023
A difficult book to rate, in that I can’t claim to have been gripped or emotionally invested, but on the other hand it is well-written and sharply-observed and I think it succeeds at its own objectives, so I’ll call it 4 stars. The author is a Nobel Prize winner and this book is very much of the type that prize rewards, although better-written and more engaging than some examples I have read.
The story follows an unnamed narrator on the way to an appointment with the secret police, who have been interrogating her for some time regarding her efforts to leave the country. The country is also unnamed but seems to be late 20th century Romania under the rule of Ceaușescu. Along the way, we learn a great deal about the narrator’s life: about her family, her two marriages, her husbands’ families, her best friend, who was killed trying to escape across the border, her office job in a clothing factory, where she faced retaliation from a superior after refusing to continue a business-trip affair. There’s a lot about her daily life and surroundings and relationships. The author’s keen observations and the privations of life under a totalitarian regime make all of it quite interesting, and the characters do feel realistic. The translation is quite good, with a strong voice and flow.
That said, it is a heavily literary book that would benefit from being read in an academic setting. The author chooses to eliminate both question marks (which made me hear much of the dialogue with a flat, resigned, slightly aggressive intonation) and quotation marks (and unlike most books that do this, here it isn’t always clear what’s spoken and what isn’t—a few times something clearly begins as dialogue but winds up sounding much more like internal monologue). There’s a lot of incest or attempted incest between daughters and fathers or father-figures, which I’m guessing is meant to comment on the corruption of society or unhealthy relationships with authority. And the ending is simply baffling; in the final analysis I think its purpose is to baffle, not to decode: it’s meant to put readers in the position of someone living in this society, confused and suspicious and necessarily paranoid. Whether it’s successful at that is up to the reader (on the one hand, realizing the book was doing that on purpose was fun; on the other, I habitually suspect the worst of fictional characters so this was hardly a new line of thought for me).
At any rate, I appreciated this book for its authentic look into a society little-known on the outside, and in that respect its lack of commercialism was a plus. And it’s a short book that doesn’t overstay its welcome. It did take me much longer to read than you’d expect of such a short book, but it was interesting, and especially fun when some little observation of life rang true in a way I hadn’t read before. Worth a read for those interested in trying something off the beaten path.
The story follows an unnamed narrator on the way to an appointment with the secret police, who have been interrogating her for some time regarding her efforts to leave the country. The country is also unnamed but seems to be late 20th century Romania under the rule of Ceaușescu. Along the way, we learn a great deal about the narrator’s life: about her family, her two marriages, her husbands’ families, her best friend, who was killed trying to escape across the border, her office job in a clothing factory, where she faced retaliation from a superior after refusing to continue a business-trip affair. There’s a lot about her daily life and surroundings and relationships. The author’s keen observations and the privations of life under a totalitarian regime make all of it quite interesting, and the characters do feel realistic. The translation is quite good, with a strong voice and flow.
That said, it is a heavily literary book that would benefit from being read in an academic setting. The author chooses to eliminate both question marks (which made me hear much of the dialogue with a flat, resigned, slightly aggressive intonation) and quotation marks (and unlike most books that do this, here it isn’t always clear what’s spoken and what isn’t—a few times something clearly begins as dialogue but winds up sounding much more like internal monologue). There’s a lot of incest or attempted incest between daughters and fathers or father-figures, which I’m guessing is meant to comment on the corruption of society or unhealthy relationships with authority. And the ending is simply baffling; in the final analysis I think its purpose is to baffle, not to decode: it’s meant to put readers in the position of someone living in this society, confused and suspicious and necessarily paranoid. Whether it’s successful at that is up to the reader (on the one hand, realizing the book was doing that on purpose was fun; on the other, I habitually suspect the worst of fictional characters so this was hardly a new line of thought for me).
At any rate, I appreciated this book for its authentic look into a society little-known on the outside, and in that respect its lack of commercialism was a plus. And it’s a short book that doesn’t overstay its welcome. It did take me much longer to read than you’d expect of such a short book, but it was interesting, and especially fun when some little observation of life rang true in a way I hadn’t read before. Worth a read for those interested in trying something off the beaten path.
February 20, 2011
Apparently I'm compelled to re-read this after finishing it - both to savor the writing, and to see how the author built this story to its chilling end. Meant to just go back and leaf through the beginning, to see where she planted various seeds and follow a thread or two, but this book is meant for serious enjoyment so here I go again.
The setting is a factory town under the thumb of communist tyranny. Our heroine has been summoned (repeatedly) to an appointment with the authorities to explain herself. We travel with her on the bus, we work with her in the factory, we join her domestic life with her second (and first) husband . . . we hope for the best, we affirm the human spirit, and yet . . .
Do not go by the jacket cover's blurb. Do not wait for her to be distracted on the bus and miss her bus stop.
Fabulous translation. A wonderful example of "witness" literature.
The setting is a factory town under the thumb of communist tyranny. Our heroine has been summoned (repeatedly) to an appointment with the authorities to explain herself. We travel with her on the bus, we work with her in the factory, we join her domestic life with her second (and first) husband . . . we hope for the best, we affirm the human spirit, and yet . . .
Do not go by the jacket cover's blurb. Do not wait for her to be distracted on the bus and miss her bus stop.
Fabulous translation. A wonderful example of "witness" literature.
May 30, 2016
این رمان برگرفته ازفضای خفقان جامعه کمونیستی قرن بیستم است وتاحدودی برگرفته ازسرگذشت خودهرتامولر.کارگرزنی که به اتهام جاسازی یادداشت هایی درجیب کت وشلوارهایی که به ایتالیا می رفت بااین مضمون:بامن ازدواج کنید.بااسم وآدرس.دربه دربه دنبال راهی برای رهایی وفرارازکشور،بارهاوبارهابرای بازجویی احضارمی شود.
"رابطه ی می گساروبطری بیشترشبیه رابطه ی زوج هادرعکس های مراسم عروسی است:همدیگررابدبخت می کنند امارها نمی کنند!"
"دوست ندارم ناچارشوم به رودخانه نگاه کنم.چیزهایی راکه باخودمی برددوست ندارم،چه انعکاس تصویرآن چیزهایی باشدکه دراطرافش است وچه اشیایی ازهمان دست برامواج چین چینش."
"رابطه ی می گساروبطری بیشترشبیه رابطه ی زوج هادرعکس های مراسم عروسی است:همدیگررابدبخت می کنند امارها نمی کنند!"
"دوست ندارم ناچارشوم به رودخانه نگاه کنم.چیزهایی راکه باخودمی برددوست ندارم،چه انعکاس تصویرآن چیزهایی باشدکه دراطرافش است وچه اشیایی ازهمان دست برامواج چین چینش."
October 19, 2020
“Daytime sleep is not deep black; it’s shallow and yellow. Our sleep is restless, the sunlight falls on our pillows. But it does make the day a little shorter.”
November 7, 2018
Herta Müller – Prémio Nobel da Literatura, 2009
”que, com a densidade da sua poesia e franqueza da prosa, retrata o universo dos desapossados”
Herta Müller nasceu em Niţchidorf, uma aldeia maioritariamente alemã, na Roménia.
O pai foi membro das Waffen-SS, a tropa de elite chefiada por Himmler na II Guerra Mundial.
A mãe foi deportada para a União Soviética, onde passou 5 anos, como trabalhadora rural.
Herta Müller estudou literatura alemã e romena na Universidade de Timisoara e fez parte do Aktionsgrupp Banat, um círculo de jovens germanófonos de oposição ao regime de Nicolae Ceauşescu (1974-1989) que defendiam a liberdade de expressão. Trabalhou como tradutora numa indústria mas a sua recusa em colaborar com a Securitate valeu-lhe um despedimento e a perseguição da polícia secreta.
Actualmente vive em Berlim.
Hoje Preferia Não Me Ter Encontrado é narrado na primeira pessoa e é a história de uma mulher, sem nome, na Roménia comunista.
“Fui intimada. Quinta-feira, dez em ponto.
Sou intimada cada vez mais vezes: terça-feira, dez em ponto, sábado, dez em ponto, quarta-feira, segunda-feira.”
Com uma certa regularidade esta mulher é intimada para prestar depoimento nas instalações da polícia secreta. O depoimento é conduzido pelo Major Albu, cuja função é descobrir mulheres que traem a pátria.
É numa dessas viagens de eléctrico – com uma duração de cerca de 1h30m – que de uma forma não linear a protagonista vai resumindo a sua vida. As temáticas abordadas são a infância na província, a fixação no pai, a deportação dos avós, o primeiro casamento com o filho do “comunista perfumado”, a amizade com Lilli, até ao difícil relacionamento que tem com o alcoólico Paul.
É uma viagem angustiante e que em alguns momentos me lembrou O Processo de Franz Kafka.
10/198 - Roménia
June 14, 2011
I’ve been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp.
So begins Herta Mueller’s novel of one woman’s life in Romania under the reign of Nicolae Ceauşescu, and we soon learn that this is not the first time our unnamed narrator has been summoned to the office of a man known only as Major Albu for the purpose of interrogation. This isn’t the first time, but for some reason, our narrator believes this interrogation will be worse than any of the interrogations that have gone before.
And what is our narrator’s crime? Sewing notes into the lining of ten white linen suits bound for Italy. “Marry me,” the notes say, along with the narrator’s name and address. To her supervisor, Nelu, these notes are the same thing as prostitution while on the job, and our narrator is “turned over” to Major Albu. Then notes proclaiming “Best Wishes from the Dictatorship” are found in the lining of suits bound for Sweden, and then more notes in suits bound for yet a third country, and our narrator is fired from her job, though she tells us she didn’t write the second and third batch. But that, of course, is irrelevant to Major Albu.
The entire novel – my paperback copy was 214 pages – takes place during the unnamed narrator’s tram ride to her appointment. The tram ride from the seventh floor apartment she shares with her second husband, the alcoholic Paul, until she misses her stop and gets off on the wrong street; a tram ride that takes about ninety minutes and for which she’s risen particularly early.
The tram ride to her appointment with Major Albu seems to trigger thoughts of just about everything in our narrator, expressed as a jumbled interior monologue, and the reader is privy to what seems to be her entire life. She remembers her father’s indiscretions with a person Mueller calls “the woman with the braid” and how our narrator wished to take that woman’s place; she remembers her good friend, Lilli, who was shot and killed while trying to escape across the border to Hungary with her lover, a sixty-six year old military officer; she remembers her own indiscretions with Nelu, the garment factory supervisor with whom she had a brief affair, then rebuffed, leading him to betray her; she remembers how she met her current husband, Paul, at a flea market where she sold the wedding ring her first husband had given her; she remembers her first husband, who betrayed her grandparents; she remembers her former father-in-law, a man she refers to as “the Perfumed Commissar,” who dispatched her grandparents to a forced labor camp while sitting astride the same white horse he rode when he confiscated the property of others.
You’ve probably guessed by now, but this is a book without a hero, a novel without a plot. That was fine with me. I love Ulysses. And as I was reading, I remembered that I loved another book with an antihero that took place entirely on a tram/train – Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line. It’s also reminiscent of Kafka’s The Castle and The Trial in that it tells the story of someone who is summoned repeatedly for interrogations. The above books, however, are much better books than The Appointment.
Rather than plot, this book’s narrative consists of a jumbled, fragmented, and elliptical narrative. While it reads smoothly enough, and it’s not at all difficult to keep track of the many jumps into the past and returns to the present, eventually, one begins to wonder if any of it is worth the trouble. The narrator isn’t a sympathetic character at all. It’s very difficult to empathize or sympathize with her, and not because she was living in Romania. The character of Lilli, I thought, who had quite a bit of spunk, would have made a much better protagonist than the numb-to-life narrator, but I feel Mueller used several autobiographical elements in building her unnamed narrator and really wouldn’t have written her any other way.
Another problem for me revolved around the interrogations that took place in Central Europe. Though I certainly don’t mean to diminish them and know they were frightening for those who had to endure them, they just aren’t the stuff that makes us want to sit up at night turning pages. We’re too used to more brutal interrogation tactics and more brutal consequences. The serious Western reader is familiar with the works of Solzhenitsyn and has read about Stalin’s Soviet Union at its very cruelest. With all due respect, what Mueller portrays in The Appointment can’t begin to compare.
Worse yet, there are no real scenes and set pieces in The Appointment. For me, this made it a dry book to read, one I plodded through and didn’t enjoy at all. At one point, regarding her life in Romania, the unnamed narrator says, “Instead of these thoughts we're constantly mulling over, it would be better to have the actual things inside your head, so you could reach in and touch them.” I would have to answer, “Yes, infinitely better.” This goes for novels, too. The reader can only take so much “telling” as opposed to “showing” before he or she grows weary enough to cast the book – and the author – aside. Being privy to the narrator’s thoughts is one thing; reading a 200 plus interior monologue is quite another. There’s some reward for the first, while the second is rarely, if ever, rewarded.
The Nobel Committee got it right when they described Mueller’s work as having “no epic line, no plot with beginning and end.” However, they were praising her books. I can’t.
At times, it seems as though the narrator is so worn down, she’s given up. She says:
Whenever I hear the elevator descending to fetch Albu’s henchmen, I can hear his voice quietly in my head: Tuesday at ten sharp, Saturday at ten sharp, Thursday at ten sharp. How often, after closing the door, have I said to Paul: I’m not going there anymore. Paul would hold me in his arms and say: If you don’t go, they’ll come and fetch you, and then they’ll have you for good.
I suppose that could be the point of the whole book – that life under Ceauşescu was so taxing that many people simply gave up. I can believe that. I can and do have much sympathy for those who had to live under that grueling regime. However, “giving up” doesn’t make for good literature. And I suppose Mueller chose not to name her narrator as a way of identifying her as an “Everyman” in Romania, but for me, the practice of not naming a main character is just annoying and amounts to misplaced conceit.
In some ways, though, the narrator, far from giving up, has herself become a mini Major Albu. She’s very forceful when it comes to her attempts to get Paul to stop drinking even though she admits to herself and to the reader that those attempts are more than likely to come to naught. She complains that “drinkers never admit anything, not even silently to themselves – and they're not about to let anyone else squeeze it out of them, especially somebody who's waiting to hear the admission." Still, she tries.
For me, sexual gratification played far too large a role in this novel. Just about everyone in the book seems to indulge in affairs with anyone and everyone they encounter. Pointless affairs that revolve around neither love nor lust. I thought, for the most part, these characters were far too worn down to indulge in affairs, which ultimately compounded their problems while bringing no relief from the boredom and drudgery that made up their days. The sex struck a very false note to me. I felt like it was inserted arbitrarily.
The Appointment is a book in translation (it was originally written in German; I read it in English), and even allowing for that translation, some of the author’s word choices are strange, to say the least. For example, at one point, the narrator likens the effect the interrogations have on her to “the way the roof of your mouth rises up and glues itself onto your brain.” For me, at least, that was just odd, and it lacked power because it was so bizarre.
Although Paul has been fired from the engine plaint where he worked (he was making contraband TV antennas that would pick up stations in Bucharest and Budapest), our narrator still thinks about the showers he took at the plant and the way the other workers would steal his clothes. Thinking of this, and comparing it to her appointments with Albu, the narrator says, “It's humiliating, there's no other word for it, when your whole body feels like it's barefoot. But what if there aren't any words at all, what if even the best word isn't enough.”
For me, “…your whole body feels like it’s barefoot” is also bizarre. Does Mueller mean she feels ashamed, as though she’s without clothes in public? If so, I think she would have been better off to simply write that rather than compare the feeling to an entire body feeling as though it’s barefoot.
And then there are the run-on sentences: “A breeze was rustling in the ash trees, I listened to the leaves, perhaps Paul was listening to the water.” Or “The giant blue mailbox is in front of the post office, how many letters can it take.” And why did the author dispense with question marks at the end of questions? I have to put this down to conceit, like the nameless narrator, because dispensing with question marks at the end of a question is not standard practice in German.
There were times, however, when I found the description in this novel to be lovely. One of those times occurs when the narrator is describing her widowed mother’s lack of affect:
When she dried herself she became like the towel, when she cleared the dishes she became like the table, and she became like the chair when she sat down.
I still prefer “showing” to “telling” but if one has to “tell” then telling like the above is both graceful and effective.
The prevailing mood of The Appointment is one of tremendous ennui. The narrator is far too worn down to feel any hate, bitterness, or antipathy. She’s reached a stage where resistance is no longer possible. I’ve heard some people say The Appointment is too bleak and hopeless for American readers. I disagree. While many Americans do love their happy endings, readers of highly literary novels love bleakness. They embrace it. I liked the subject matter around which the novel revolved. I just didn’t like that way the author wrote about it.
In the end, I think the book can be summed up in this short paragraph, one of the best paragraphs in the entire novel:
Each shoreline was marked by wooden crosses set in the rocks, bearing the dates on which people had drowned. Cemeteries underwater and crosses all around – portents of dangerous times to come. As if all those round lakes were hungry and needed their yearly ration of meat delivered on the dates inscribed. Here no one dived for the dead: the water would snuff out life in an instant, chilling you to the bone in a matter of seconds.
In The Appointment, the energy it took to monitor one’s thoughts, words, and actions 24/7 was enough to “snuff out life in an instant,” and I think, at times, the narrator, herself, would have preferred being chilled to the bone in one of those watery graves.
1/5
Recommended: No. The book is too pointless and burdensome to read. The interior monologue is exhausting. The reader is left with no lasting image, no reward for having read. However, this is the impression the book left on me; I know people who loved it, so always keep the subjective component of literature in mind.
Read my book reviews and tips for writers at www.literarycornercafe.blogspot.com
So begins Herta Mueller’s novel of one woman’s life in Romania under the reign of Nicolae Ceauşescu, and we soon learn that this is not the first time our unnamed narrator has been summoned to the office of a man known only as Major Albu for the purpose of interrogation. This isn’t the first time, but for some reason, our narrator believes this interrogation will be worse than any of the interrogations that have gone before.
And what is our narrator’s crime? Sewing notes into the lining of ten white linen suits bound for Italy. “Marry me,” the notes say, along with the narrator’s name and address. To her supervisor, Nelu, these notes are the same thing as prostitution while on the job, and our narrator is “turned over” to Major Albu. Then notes proclaiming “Best Wishes from the Dictatorship” are found in the lining of suits bound for Sweden, and then more notes in suits bound for yet a third country, and our narrator is fired from her job, though she tells us she didn’t write the second and third batch. But that, of course, is irrelevant to Major Albu.
The entire novel – my paperback copy was 214 pages – takes place during the unnamed narrator’s tram ride to her appointment. The tram ride from the seventh floor apartment she shares with her second husband, the alcoholic Paul, until she misses her stop and gets off on the wrong street; a tram ride that takes about ninety minutes and for which she’s risen particularly early.
The tram ride to her appointment with Major Albu seems to trigger thoughts of just about everything in our narrator, expressed as a jumbled interior monologue, and the reader is privy to what seems to be her entire life. She remembers her father’s indiscretions with a person Mueller calls “the woman with the braid” and how our narrator wished to take that woman’s place; she remembers her good friend, Lilli, who was shot and killed while trying to escape across the border to Hungary with her lover, a sixty-six year old military officer; she remembers her own indiscretions with Nelu, the garment factory supervisor with whom she had a brief affair, then rebuffed, leading him to betray her; she remembers how she met her current husband, Paul, at a flea market where she sold the wedding ring her first husband had given her; she remembers her first husband, who betrayed her grandparents; she remembers her former father-in-law, a man she refers to as “the Perfumed Commissar,” who dispatched her grandparents to a forced labor camp while sitting astride the same white horse he rode when he confiscated the property of others.
You’ve probably guessed by now, but this is a book without a hero, a novel without a plot. That was fine with me. I love Ulysses. And as I was reading, I remembered that I loved another book with an antihero that took place entirely on a tram/train – Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow to the End of the Line. It’s also reminiscent of Kafka’s The Castle and The Trial in that it tells the story of someone who is summoned repeatedly for interrogations. The above books, however, are much better books than The Appointment.
Rather than plot, this book’s narrative consists of a jumbled, fragmented, and elliptical narrative. While it reads smoothly enough, and it’s not at all difficult to keep track of the many jumps into the past and returns to the present, eventually, one begins to wonder if any of it is worth the trouble. The narrator isn’t a sympathetic character at all. It’s very difficult to empathize or sympathize with her, and not because she was living in Romania. The character of Lilli, I thought, who had quite a bit of spunk, would have made a much better protagonist than the numb-to-life narrator, but I feel Mueller used several autobiographical elements in building her unnamed narrator and really wouldn’t have written her any other way.
Another problem for me revolved around the interrogations that took place in Central Europe. Though I certainly don’t mean to diminish them and know they were frightening for those who had to endure them, they just aren’t the stuff that makes us want to sit up at night turning pages. We’re too used to more brutal interrogation tactics and more brutal consequences. The serious Western reader is familiar with the works of Solzhenitsyn and has read about Stalin’s Soviet Union at its very cruelest. With all due respect, what Mueller portrays in The Appointment can’t begin to compare.
Worse yet, there are no real scenes and set pieces in The Appointment. For me, this made it a dry book to read, one I plodded through and didn’t enjoy at all. At one point, regarding her life in Romania, the unnamed narrator says, “Instead of these thoughts we're constantly mulling over, it would be better to have the actual things inside your head, so you could reach in and touch them.” I would have to answer, “Yes, infinitely better.” This goes for novels, too. The reader can only take so much “telling” as opposed to “showing” before he or she grows weary enough to cast the book – and the author – aside. Being privy to the narrator’s thoughts is one thing; reading a 200 plus interior monologue is quite another. There’s some reward for the first, while the second is rarely, if ever, rewarded.
The Nobel Committee got it right when they described Mueller’s work as having “no epic line, no plot with beginning and end.” However, they were praising her books. I can’t.
At times, it seems as though the narrator is so worn down, she’s given up. She says:
Whenever I hear the elevator descending to fetch Albu’s henchmen, I can hear his voice quietly in my head: Tuesday at ten sharp, Saturday at ten sharp, Thursday at ten sharp. How often, after closing the door, have I said to Paul: I’m not going there anymore. Paul would hold me in his arms and say: If you don’t go, they’ll come and fetch you, and then they’ll have you for good.
I suppose that could be the point of the whole book – that life under Ceauşescu was so taxing that many people simply gave up. I can believe that. I can and do have much sympathy for those who had to live under that grueling regime. However, “giving up” doesn’t make for good literature. And I suppose Mueller chose not to name her narrator as a way of identifying her as an “Everyman” in Romania, but for me, the practice of not naming a main character is just annoying and amounts to misplaced conceit.
In some ways, though, the narrator, far from giving up, has herself become a mini Major Albu. She’s very forceful when it comes to her attempts to get Paul to stop drinking even though she admits to herself and to the reader that those attempts are more than likely to come to naught. She complains that “drinkers never admit anything, not even silently to themselves – and they're not about to let anyone else squeeze it out of them, especially somebody who's waiting to hear the admission." Still, she tries.
For me, sexual gratification played far too large a role in this novel. Just about everyone in the book seems to indulge in affairs with anyone and everyone they encounter. Pointless affairs that revolve around neither love nor lust. I thought, for the most part, these characters were far too worn down to indulge in affairs, which ultimately compounded their problems while bringing no relief from the boredom and drudgery that made up their days. The sex struck a very false note to me. I felt like it was inserted arbitrarily.
The Appointment is a book in translation (it was originally written in German; I read it in English), and even allowing for that translation, some of the author’s word choices are strange, to say the least. For example, at one point, the narrator likens the effect the interrogations have on her to “the way the roof of your mouth rises up and glues itself onto your brain.” For me, at least, that was just odd, and it lacked power because it was so bizarre.
Although Paul has been fired from the engine plaint where he worked (he was making contraband TV antennas that would pick up stations in Bucharest and Budapest), our narrator still thinks about the showers he took at the plant and the way the other workers would steal his clothes. Thinking of this, and comparing it to her appointments with Albu, the narrator says, “It's humiliating, there's no other word for it, when your whole body feels like it's barefoot. But what if there aren't any words at all, what if even the best word isn't enough.”
For me, “…your whole body feels like it’s barefoot” is also bizarre. Does Mueller mean she feels ashamed, as though she’s without clothes in public? If so, I think she would have been better off to simply write that rather than compare the feeling to an entire body feeling as though it’s barefoot.
And then there are the run-on sentences: “A breeze was rustling in the ash trees, I listened to the leaves, perhaps Paul was listening to the water.” Or “The giant blue mailbox is in front of the post office, how many letters can it take.” And why did the author dispense with question marks at the end of questions? I have to put this down to conceit, like the nameless narrator, because dispensing with question marks at the end of a question is not standard practice in German.
There were times, however, when I found the description in this novel to be lovely. One of those times occurs when the narrator is describing her widowed mother’s lack of affect:
When she dried herself she became like the towel, when she cleared the dishes she became like the table, and she became like the chair when she sat down.
I still prefer “showing” to “telling” but if one has to “tell” then telling like the above is both graceful and effective.
The prevailing mood of The Appointment is one of tremendous ennui. The narrator is far too worn down to feel any hate, bitterness, or antipathy. She’s reached a stage where resistance is no longer possible. I’ve heard some people say The Appointment is too bleak and hopeless for American readers. I disagree. While many Americans do love their happy endings, readers of highly literary novels love bleakness. They embrace it. I liked the subject matter around which the novel revolved. I just didn’t like that way the author wrote about it.
In the end, I think the book can be summed up in this short paragraph, one of the best paragraphs in the entire novel:
Each shoreline was marked by wooden crosses set in the rocks, bearing the dates on which people had drowned. Cemeteries underwater and crosses all around – portents of dangerous times to come. As if all those round lakes were hungry and needed their yearly ration of meat delivered on the dates inscribed. Here no one dived for the dead: the water would snuff out life in an instant, chilling you to the bone in a matter of seconds.
In The Appointment, the energy it took to monitor one’s thoughts, words, and actions 24/7 was enough to “snuff out life in an instant,” and I think, at times, the narrator, herself, would have preferred being chilled to the bone in one of those watery graves.
1/5
Recommended: No. The book is too pointless and burdensome to read. The interior monologue is exhausting. The reader is left with no lasting image, no reward for having read. However, this is the impression the book left on me; I know people who loved it, so always keep the subjective component of literature in mind.
Read my book reviews and tips for writers at www.literarycornercafe.blogspot.com
March 24, 2014
"You don't have to be particularly bad off to think: This can't be all the life I get."
Due to Müller's own history I'd expected the big reveal to be some betrayal of Lilli's, so I'm still reeling from that ending.
The Appointment is two hundred fourteen pages of 100 proof claustrophobic terror, in which even the consolations of poetry, sex, love, and nature are laced through with a melancholy so total that if you have any unquestioned assumptions about the basis of your own consolations, expect to question them along with Müller's canny but broken narrator for the hours that it takes you to complete this book.
(I would like the original German for this closing line if anyone has it.)
Müller's narrator lives in a world where a powerful man cares more about a pretty horse than the men and women he breaks in the name of the state and his own personal advancements. On the way to a ten a.m. appointment with a major that she believes knows that she has done nothing wrong but who will anyway act as if it is his most urgent professional priority to unearth her many secret acts of treason, Müller's narrator recounts in nonlinear fashion life with her first husband, a friendship with a now-dead coquette, her grandparents' and parents' angular lives and sad, pointless love affairs, the absurd origins of her current political troubles, prior "appointments" with the major, and her meet-cute at a flea market and quiet but satisfying life with the alcoholic, motorcycle-riding Paul.
I didn't love the elliptical format, but it was certainly effective. I felt like I never knew where the book would veer at any moment, and this was deeply unsettling. With each sentence, I never knew if I would be getting some mundane and boring detail about one of her fellow tram riders, some startling beautiful prose marrying local imagery to a piece of novel yet timeless and universal wisdom, or a clue about the mystery at the center of the book. This made for slow reading with no skimming, but it's difficult to fault Müller for making every word count.
Who can the summoned person trust? Trust is a luxury in Ceaușescu's Romania. Müller only asks to stay sane.
Due to Müller's own history I'd expected the big reveal to be some betrayal of Lilli's, so I'm still reeling from that ending.
The Appointment is two hundred fourteen pages of 100 proof claustrophobic terror, in which even the consolations of poetry, sex, love, and nature are laced through with a melancholy so total that if you have any unquestioned assumptions about the basis of your own consolations, expect to question them along with Müller's canny but broken narrator for the hours that it takes you to complete this book.
"The trick is not to go mad."
(I would like the original German for this closing line if anyone has it.)
Müller's narrator lives in a world where a powerful man cares more about a pretty horse than the men and women he breaks in the name of the state and his own personal advancements. On the way to a ten a.m. appointment with a major that she believes knows that she has done nothing wrong but who will anyway act as if it is his most urgent professional priority to unearth her many secret acts of treason, Müller's narrator recounts in nonlinear fashion life with her first husband, a friendship with a now-dead coquette, her grandparents' and parents' angular lives and sad, pointless love affairs, the absurd origins of her current political troubles, prior "appointments" with the major, and her meet-cute at a flea market and quiet but satisfying life with the alcoholic, motorcycle-riding Paul.
I didn't love the elliptical format, but it was certainly effective. I felt like I never knew where the book would veer at any moment, and this was deeply unsettling. With each sentence, I never knew if I would be getting some mundane and boring detail about one of her fellow tram riders, some startling beautiful prose marrying local imagery to a piece of novel yet timeless and universal wisdom, or a clue about the mystery at the center of the book. This made for slow reading with no skimming, but it's difficult to fault Müller for making every word count.
Who can the summoned person trust? Trust is a luxury in Ceaușescu's Romania. Müller only asks to stay sane.
October 30, 2022
Una de las cosas que más me gustan de esta novela es su estupendo título. Suena a cómo diría una poeta aquello de «Hoy no tengo el chocho pa farolillos». De verdad que no estoy intentando hacer la gracieja. Digo lo que he dicho porque pienso que el estilo de Herta Müller proporciona una extraña mezcla de humor, desquiciamiento, asco, belleza y miedo. Y que seguramente eso es lo que le da a su obra una personalidad tan difícilmente imitable.
Por ejemplo, en esta novela Müller habla mucho de frutas. Que sí, que el tema es la dictadura de Nicolae Ceaușescu, pero la autora tiene demasiado talento como para tratar las cosas literalmente. Entonces, habla mucho de frutas, que son algo maravilloso, bonito y fragante, pero la mayor parte de las veces esas frutas te dan asco. Son moras pisadas y arrastradas por la porquería de la calle durante kilómetros, son la pulpa mordida de la que cuelga un hilito de saliva, es el carozo con fragmentos incomibles pegados, ya en el cubo de la basura. Incluso un par de cerezas, una de las frutas más hermosas que existen, parecen llenas de malos presentimientos. En esta novela de Herta Müller, que parece breve pero que no se lee con rapidez, la belleza o el amor tienen siempre un componente de repugnancia y de miedo. Así es como te vas haciendo cargo de lo que debe de ser vivir bajo una dictadura en la que un traspiés lo mismo te cuesta la vida, la tensión diaria en que, a pesar de todo, buscas tu porción de alegría, porque no puedes hacer otra cosa. Luchar, sobre todo, por no perder la cordura. Aun así siempre va a venir un recordatorio de que no, no tienes derecho a esperar ser mínimamente feliz.
A Herta Müller, parece, le reprochaban algunas personas que hablara de la dictadura de manera tan estética y con palabras tan bonitas. Yo no sé si ella respondió en algún momento a esas críticas, pero perfectamente podría haber dicho que ella hablaba de sus experiencias como le daba la real gana, y que el que quisiera podía venir cualquier día a comerle todo el Nobel. Bueno, no, ella lo habría dicho de una manera mucho menos ordinaria.
Por ejemplo, en esta novela Müller habla mucho de frutas. Que sí, que el tema es la dictadura de Nicolae Ceaușescu, pero la autora tiene demasiado talento como para tratar las cosas literalmente. Entonces, habla mucho de frutas, que son algo maravilloso, bonito y fragante, pero la mayor parte de las veces esas frutas te dan asco. Son moras pisadas y arrastradas por la porquería de la calle durante kilómetros, son la pulpa mordida de la que cuelga un hilito de saliva, es el carozo con fragmentos incomibles pegados, ya en el cubo de la basura. Incluso un par de cerezas, una de las frutas más hermosas que existen, parecen llenas de malos presentimientos. En esta novela de Herta Müller, que parece breve pero que no se lee con rapidez, la belleza o el amor tienen siempre un componente de repugnancia y de miedo. Así es como te vas haciendo cargo de lo que debe de ser vivir bajo una dictadura en la que un traspiés lo mismo te cuesta la vida, la tensión diaria en que, a pesar de todo, buscas tu porción de alegría, porque no puedes hacer otra cosa. Luchar, sobre todo, por no perder la cordura. Aun así siempre va a venir un recordatorio de que no, no tienes derecho a esperar ser mínimamente feliz.
A Herta Müller, parece, le reprochaban algunas personas que hablara de la dictadura de manera tan estética y con palabras tan bonitas. Yo no sé si ella respondió en algún momento a esas críticas, pero perfectamente podría haber dicho que ella hablaba de sus experiencias como le daba la real gana, y que el que quisiera podía venir cualquier día a comerle todo el Nobel. Bueno, no, ella lo habría dicho de una manera mucho menos ordinaria.
May 5, 2022
3,5 Sterne
Ich bin mir mit der Bewertung ganz unklar. Möglicherweise werde ich nochmal ändern.
Ein sehr beklemmendes Buch! Und wie sie die Strassenbahnfahrt nutzt, um Beobachtungen, Erinnerungen und Bilder einzubringen ist groß. Sie entwickelt dadurch auch einen eigenen Sprachrhythmus, der sich am Ende, als sie aussteigt dramatisch ändert. Ich war dabei, als sie eilig versuchte voranzukommen.
Trotzdem haben einige ihrer Bilder bei mir absolut gar nicht gezündet. Wer weint schon Zahnpasta? Nun habe ich persönlich ohnehin gerne ein Problem mit artifizieller Schreibweise. Einige Bilder fand ich berührend. " Ich sah meiner Mutter in die Augen und wurde aufs Eis geführt".
Sie zeigt die Bedrohung, das Unberechenbare, den Dreck , das Erbärmliche und die Verrohung einer tyrannisierten, hungernden, traumatisierten Gesellschaft plastisch! Kaum ist etwas Leichtigkeit spürbar, lediglich, wenn sie die Motorradfahrten mit ihrem Freund beschreibt oder von ihrer Freundin Lilli erzählt.
Ein Buch, das mich noch lange beschäftigen wird .
Und sollte jemand mir die letzten Seiten erklären können ,oder einfach seine Meinung schreiben: Bitte sehr, sehr, gerne! Ich habe meine Theorie, aber halte andere Sichtweisen für möglich.
Ich bin mir mit der Bewertung ganz unklar. Möglicherweise werde ich nochmal ändern.
Ein sehr beklemmendes Buch! Und wie sie die Strassenbahnfahrt nutzt, um Beobachtungen, Erinnerungen und Bilder einzubringen ist groß. Sie entwickelt dadurch auch einen eigenen Sprachrhythmus, der sich am Ende, als sie aussteigt dramatisch ändert. Ich war dabei, als sie eilig versuchte voranzukommen.
Trotzdem haben einige ihrer Bilder bei mir absolut gar nicht gezündet. Wer weint schon Zahnpasta? Nun habe ich persönlich ohnehin gerne ein Problem mit artifizieller Schreibweise. Einige Bilder fand ich berührend. " Ich sah meiner Mutter in die Augen und wurde aufs Eis geführt".
Sie zeigt die Bedrohung, das Unberechenbare, den Dreck , das Erbärmliche und die Verrohung einer tyrannisierten, hungernden, traumatisierten Gesellschaft plastisch! Kaum ist etwas Leichtigkeit spürbar, lediglich, wenn sie die Motorradfahrten mit ihrem Freund beschreibt oder von ihrer Freundin Lilli erzählt.
Ein Buch, das mich noch lange beschäftigen wird .
Und sollte jemand mir die letzten Seiten erklären können ,oder einfach seine Meinung schreiben: Bitte sehr, sehr, gerne! Ich habe meine Theorie, aber halte andere Sichtweisen für möglich.
November 10, 2012
Ho deciso di leggere questo libro perché mi ha colpito il titolo e perché molte volte, troppe nella mia vita avrei preferito non incontrarmi, non esistere, sfuggire a me stessa, proprio come accade alla protagonista.
Dopo un approccio alquanto difficile, in quanto dovevo abituarmi al suo stile, mi sono pian piano innamorata di questo libro e di questa scrittrice. Durante la lettura, ho dovuto prendere lunghi sospiri e respiri, perché le parole di Herta Muller mi sono entrate dentro facendomi male.
"Avrei preferito non incontrarmi" è la storia di un viaggio in tram che la protagonista, di cui non conosciamo il nome, compie per recarsi all'appuntamento con i servizi segreti sotto la dittatura di Ceasescu.Il viaggio non è altro che il simbolo tra il passato e il presente, il passato caratterizzato dal primo matrimonio, da un rapporto semierotico con il padre, dalla morte dell'amica Lilli uccisa, sino al racconto di deportazione del nonno e il presente con Paul, dedito all'alcol.
Un romanzo in cui passato e presente si intersecano, si fondono regalandoci una poesia, una bellezza rara.
Dopo un approccio alquanto difficile, in quanto dovevo abituarmi al suo stile, mi sono pian piano innamorata di questo libro e di questa scrittrice. Durante la lettura, ho dovuto prendere lunghi sospiri e respiri, perché le parole di Herta Muller mi sono entrate dentro facendomi male.
"Avrei preferito non incontrarmi" è la storia di un viaggio in tram che la protagonista, di cui non conosciamo il nome, compie per recarsi all'appuntamento con i servizi segreti sotto la dittatura di Ceasescu.Il viaggio non è altro che il simbolo tra il passato e il presente, il passato caratterizzato dal primo matrimonio, da un rapporto semierotico con il padre, dalla morte dell'amica Lilli uccisa, sino al racconto di deportazione del nonno e il presente con Paul, dedito all'alcol.
Un romanzo in cui passato e presente si intersecano, si fondono regalandoci una poesia, una bellezza rara.
January 5, 2021
I do understand how this piece of historical fiction could be seen as a good read, but I definitely do not agree with its Nobel Laureate affiliation. I had high expectations based on the synopsis as well as its critical acclaim, but was greatly disappointed. The story, regarding a young woman during the communist regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania who is periodically summoned by a man in the secret police for interrogations due to her misstep of attempting to surreptitiously slip notes asking for a man's hand in marriage inside coat linings.
The plot was interesting enough, but Muller failed to take it anywhere near its potential. It seemed most repetitious and increasingly painful to read as the plot went nowhere; unlike other books that craft an entire book around one event or short time period, The Appointment failed to impress. Even worse, the ending was quite anti-climatic. I expected more.
The plot was interesting enough, but Muller failed to take it anywhere near its potential. It seemed most repetitious and increasingly painful to read as the plot went nowhere; unlike other books that craft an entire book around one event or short time period, The Appointment failed to impress. Even worse, the ending was quite anti-climatic. I expected more.
December 31, 2009
A beautifully crafted book, so subtle in its manipulation of the reader, in the quiet exposition of terror. During the course of a morning tram ride to an "appointment" with her "Major"—her interogator with the secret police, presumably the Departamentul Securităţii Statului—our un-named narrator reflects on the course of her life which lead to this particular point in time. While all the specifics of time and place are unannounced, anyone familiar with Herta Müller's personal history will recognise the Swabian minority in the Romania of Ceauşescu, that 'landscape of the dispossessed' (as the Nobel committee rendered it).
The original title, Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet, translates as "I wouldn't want to meet myself like this"; it's intriguingly apt (though certainly not commercial in the States).
The original title, Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet, translates as "I wouldn't want to meet myself like this"; it's intriguingly apt (though certainly not commercial in the States).
November 16, 2018
Herta Muller nos propone en esta novela asistir al clima de asfixia que vive la protagonista de la novela en la Rumania del régimen comunista (y no solo ella, claro). Se me ocurren un par de observaciones. Si tomamos esta historia como un testimonio de la situación política del país y sus repercusiones en un puñado de personajes, entonces encontraremos varias aristas interesantes, tanto en los aspectos públicos o privados. Si nos centramos en los aspectos estrictamente novelescos, ficcionales, tal vez concluiremos que no es una obra que impresione demasiado. Acaso el que la autora haya obtenido hace casi una década el Nobel haya colocado demasiado alta la vara y uno se vuelva demasiado exigente, en cuyo caso probablemente quede gusto a poco.
November 18, 2016
3,5 tähteä. Todella ahdistava kirja naisesta, jonka piti käydä melkein joka päivä kuulusteluissa. Kuulusteluista ei paljon kerrottu, mutta sen verran, että lukijana olin todella peloissani. Pelko oli psykologista ja se vaikutti ajatteluun, jopa niin, että nainen tunsi kuinka kaikki muuttui sekavaksi, pelottavaksi, omituiseksi, ja kaikenlaiset pakkomielteet valtasivat ajatukset.
March 31, 2021
Kitap yek bir tramvay yolculuğu üzerinden karekterin hayata yolculuğunu anlatıyor. Öyle olmuyor mu zaten, herkes her şey bir yolculukta akıllarda. Ben detaylarla doluluğunu çok sevdim. Dili şiir gbi, çok güzel yazmış.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 597 reviews