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The Appointment: A Novel

by Herta Müller, Michael Hulse (Translator), Philip Boehm (Translator)

3.35 of 5 stars 3.35 · rating details · 873 ratings · 192 reviews

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...more

ebook, 208 pages

Published September 13th 2001 by Metropolitan Books (first published 1997)

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May 25, 2012 William rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: translation, romania, 20-ce, fiction

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. Almost 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...more 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. Almost 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 assassination of the old tyrant Ceauşescu and his termagant wife. (See YouTube for video.)

The state’s involvement in the minutia 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. Their news is hortatory propaganda. There is no cultural life to speak of, no artistic expression. Romania under Ceauşescu makes Orwell’s 1984 look like a grand day spent at Six Flags.

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.(less)

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Feb 20, 2011 Emily rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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 h...more

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Jul 21, 2010 Jennifer rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

From My Blog...[return][return]The Appointment by Herta Müller is an absolute masterpiece of literature. The narrator is on a tram, once again heading to face another interrogation by Ceausescu’s secret police, and while she heads to this appointment she recounts various moments in her life, allowing the reader an inside look into another world, one that is difficult to imagine, yet Müller’s descriptions are spot on. With breath-taking beauty, Müller details with precision the simple, the mundan...more

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Nov 10, 2012 Simona rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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...more

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Apr 09, 2013 José-contemplates-Saturn's Aurora rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: romanian-lit

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 frozen lakes…and cro...more

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Mar 05, 2013 Ariadna73 rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The appointment is the story of a woman who is riding the bus to get to a place where she has an appointment. The appointment is a set up to be interrogated by a policeman on suspected treason charges. She is accused of treason because she has been dropping "marry me" notes in a few tuxedos with the intention to send them to Italy; trying to find an Italian man that helped her escape the dictatorship regime in her country.

While riding the bus, she remembers all the events that leaded her to thi...more

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Jan 22, 2013 Lorenzo rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: romanian, 2013-readings, standing-still

I liked "The Land of Green Plums" by the same author, but this novel - while keeping a similar pace, setting and style - doesn't convince me.

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Feb 24, 2013 Josiah rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The Appointment presents a real life dystopia: Romania under communist rule. Whereas Brave New World and 1984 focused on the dystopian, totalitarian structure, The Appointment focuses on the victim civilians as presented through the eyes of the 1st person narrator. What we see is a society of crushed humans whose interactions with each other are marked by contempt, abuse, and distrust. We see a society were feelings for others are fleeting and shallow, where the sensitive will slip form neurosis...more

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Jul 15, 2012 Angela rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I have to be honest here, I have no idea what happened in this book. It is captivating, beautiful in parts and frightening in others. But the chronology jumps all over the place as the narrator reflects on her past, present and future. You find yourself losing your place constantly. However, this is a story about a fascist regime and the techniques employed to keep the citizens terrified, confused and in a state of powerlessness, so it is a clever technique. My feeling is that Muller is keeping...more

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Jun 12, 2012 Nick D rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A difficult book, this novel by Nobel Laureate Herta Muller. A fired factory worker travels by streetcar, narrating by turns observations about the idiosyncratic passengers and driver, and telling the story of her life in no discernible order. Muller knows how to construct a life that feels lived: the narrator's marriages, family members, her one friend, her interrogator and her nemesis slip into vision and out of it easily and realistically. She also knows how to construct a city populated by p...more

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Jan 18, 2012 wally rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: muller

this will be the 1st muller for me. starts out:

i've been summoned. thursday, at ten sharp.
lately i'm being summoned more and more often: ten sharp on tuesday, ten sharp on saturday, one wednesday, monday. as if years were a week, i'm amazed that winter comes so close on the heels of late summer.

so...obviously 1st person, hey? kindle. onward and upward.

update: at the 27% mark...

...looking at some of the other reviews...pondering, pondering, chewing on cheetos, the generic version, one dollar at w...more

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Jan 11, 2012 Jillwilson rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

What little I know of life in Romania has been conveyed mainly by films until now. I have seen some splendid films including Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Day, and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which I thought about a lot when I was reading The Appointment. In the latter film, an old man is carted from hospital to hospital in the course of one night, getting sicker and sicker as doctors keep refusing to treat him and send him away. The plot line of The Appointment is not dissimilar. The main ch...more What little I know of life in Romania has been conveyed mainly by films until now. I have seen some splendid films including Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Day, and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which I thought about a lot when I was reading The Appointment. In the latter film, an old man is carted from hospital to hospital in the course of one night, getting sicker and sicker as doctors keep refusing to treat him and send him away. The plot line of The Appointment is not dissimilar. The main character (unnamed) is on a tram journey across town which lasts the course of the book. She has been “summoned” by the authorities for interrogation; this trip is just one of many already taken. The journey in the story allows for the character to reflect on her life while adding a kind of forward impetus to the narrative. We are keen to find out what will happen to her as we linger in the surreal and muddy waters of life under the Ceauescu regime.

It’s a hard book to read. There is nothing desirable about her life and awful things happen to most characters. As occurs in toxic regimes (and this applies to workplaces as much as cultures and countries), people behave very badly toward one another when there is fear and scape-goating around. Or they drink to escape or have nihilistic or abusive sex. All of these elements pertain in this novel. I can’t say that I enjoyed reading it but it provides both a sense of truth, and some very fine writing. Take the following for example: “The water squirted and gathered around the tree trunks in shallow pools, full of drowned ants. The earth drank slowly. Then Grandfather said You go out for a walk and the world opens up for you. And before you've even stretched your legs properly, it closes shut. From here to there it's just the farty splutter of a lantern. And they call that having lived. It's not worth the bother of putting on your shoes.” (p80)

This novel, was written by Herta Muller emigrated to Germany in 1987, two years before the Ceauescu regime was overthrown. She accurately captures the way in which the individual is made powerless by the state in writing: "there's nothing to think about, because I myself am nothing, apart from being summoned." One reviewer, Costica Bradatan, wrote: “Müller's work is political not in any superficial way, but in the more profound sense of literature as bearing witness. ‘Bearing witness’ is just the right phrase – it doesn’t make it an easy read but it does make the narrative compelling. It reminds me of the novel I read earlier in the year set in Libya (In the Country of Men). In that case, the author made the politics more palatable by telling the story through the perspective of a small boy. I liked that novel a lot but I’m glad that Muller didn’t try to make it easy to read. Like the ride with Mr Lazarescu, you kind of need to endure the awfulness and the craziness. I guess the other obvious comparison is anything by Kafka, but I haven’t been in that territory for a long time.

Bradatan also writes “There is a Romantic misconception that terror has always to be impressive, fierce and appropriately Luciferian – in other words, that terror is nothing if it is not spectacular. However, that's rarely the case in real life. As Czeslaw Milosz excellently put it in The Native Realm, “Terror is not … monumental; it is abject, it has a furtive glance, it destroys the fabric of human society and changes the relationships of millions of individuals into channels for blackmail…That's why Herta Müller's work is so important: It maps out, with surgical precision, this mediocre yet sinister face of European totalitarianism, which is something that has been largely unaccounted for.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/a...
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Aug 07, 2011 Allan MacDonell rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I've never visited Romania, but I've been visited by the creeping certainties that lead acquaintances, coworkers and family members to brand you paranoid or bitter, even after all you've intuited has turned out to be true. Luckily, my world-view is less low-ceilinged and windowless than Herta Muller's—I don't live in a state where gas-lighting the populace is the specialty of an entire branch of the authoritarian government (except, maybe I do live in that kind of place), and Muller grew up in a...more

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Jul 20, 2011 Anda rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Though this is not one of my favourite books by Herta Müller, I still recommend it. It is representative for her style, which I personally find breathtaking. It is strong and sharp, expressing sadness, frustration and even a kind of guilt of living within an oppressive regime, like that one of Ceausescu. A regime that forced people to become cowards and to renounce their humanity; and those who cared about their conscience remained alone, very alone, isolated, unable to rely on somebody or somet...more

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Jun 15, 2011 Janet Leszl rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I had to force myself to keep reading this one. I’m sorry to say this was one of my least favorite books. The lack of separation into chapters or very clear breaks as the author continually jumped all over the place was frustrating. There were so many endless side tangents that had tangents running away from them as well. Often I had to question what the point behind them was. At times she revealed elements of living under the repressive authorities, but it took a long and jumpy ride to get ther...more

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Jun 14, 2011 TheGirlBytheSeaofCortez rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: books-i-did-not-like, books-in-translation, contemporary-authors, eastern-european-literature, literary-fiction, nobel-winning-authors, novellas, stream-of-consciousness

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...more

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Feb 10, 2010 Aly rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Herta Muller is the most recent author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature-- since I generally enjoy works by Nobel Prize winners, I bought this book.

I must say, I was somewhat disappointed. The book's style is somewhat stream-of-consciousness-- we follow the main character, who is a resident of communist Romania and is periodically interrogated regarding an incident from years ago in which she slipped notes into the pockets of the jackets she manufactured reading "Please marry me". In the boo...more Herta Muller is the most recent author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature-- since I generally enjoy works by Nobel Prize winners, I bought this book.

I must say, I was somewhat disappointed. The book's style is somewhat stream-of-consciousness-- we follow the main character, who is a resident of communist Romania and is periodically interrogated regarding an incident from years ago in which she slipped notes into the pockets of the jackets she manufactured reading "Please marry me". In the book, she is currently traveling to one of these interrogations, and we are privy to the thoughts and memories this trip conjures up.

I suppose what the book conveys best is the effect of terror on the individual's mind-- her thoughts are erratic, wildly unhinged in time, in content, in character. We learn about her life very sporadically-- she reveals some memories in great detail all at once, others are hinted at multiple times before they're finally brought to light. In the end, I didn't feel like I knew the character well enough-- I felt like the scraps I'd been given were miserly, and that they didn't cohere particularly well. It reminded me of the end of The Golden Notebook, in which Anna Wulf essentially loses her mind for a month or so. And I think that's the point: one of the sentences that has stuck with me is something along the lines of: "The hardest thing is to stay sane."

Now, I've read lots of books about living under repressive regimes, and I could guess what forces make sanity a difficult thing to maintain, but Muller herself doesn't give you much insight. The interrogations happen; but why was the main character so desperate to leave in the first place, that she would offer herself up to any man who happened to find a note in the pocket of his new jacket? She recounts stories of her grandfather's experiences when the regime was initially established, and these are sufficiently ghoulish, but the main character herself-- what has she experienced? From what we're given in the book, mainly failed relationships, not political repression.

Although, perhaps that's the point: the main character herself is not a political rebel, not a member of any resistance group; she is, instead, a woman who is desperately searching for love, and the whimsical actions she takes are made into political actions by the regime.(less)

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Jan 21, 2010 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A really pretty amazing book, and one that is sort of different than it's description-- there's none of the rompiness you'd expect from a book about a woman who randomly solicits italian men to marry her and save her from Communist Romania. I'm not saying that doesn't happen, though I think that's misrepresented, just that it's not at the core of the book.

What is at the heart of the book, I think, is the relationship between our narrator, the woman who has in the past sent these notes abroad, an...more

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Jan 02, 2010 Stephen rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

In this portrayal of life in Ceausescu's Romania, a woman lives under the stress of being repeatedly "summoned" to answer questions about her "crime," which was sewing "marry me" into the lining of clothes she was fashioning for export to Italy. This alone may make her a traitor. But her real mistake, which led to her falling afoul of the government, was granting sexual favors to her boss while they were on a business trip and then later turning him away so that out of spite he reports her. Thus...more

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Jul 08, 2010 John rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I think I realized, while reading this, what my approach needs to be towards stream-of-consciousness novels. I need to break myself of my feeling that every word matters in these kinds of books. When I'm reading more traditional novels or non-fiction books, every word does matter, pretty much, so when I find myself confused, I always go back and read things over until I have a better understanding of what is happening. But the only reason this works is because the author intended every part of t...more

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Mar 01, 2013 Anne rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction

The Appointment refers to the narrator being ordered to meet with a government interrogator as she has been accused of putting notes in garments being exported to Italy from the factory where she works. The notes are intended to attract the attention of someone to free her from the repression of the Communist regime. During the 90 minute tram ride to get to the interrogation, she contemplates passengers on the bus and relives many of the events and memories of her life, which has been filled wit...more

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May 31, 2012 Mike Clinton rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I didn't find this book satisfying as a reading experience. Muller has a unique voice as a writer, but her approach to writing doesn't seem to take the reader into account. The Nobel lecture included as an appendix to this novel clarified the use of words and images - with their intentional opacity, disorientation, idiosyncratic associations - but that doesn't make the reading experience any more engaging and compelling.

The story follows a woman's thoughts and memories as she travels on a tram...more

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Feb 19, 2013 Shawn rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The author skilfully relates the frustration, fear, anxiety, paranoia and resentment that saturated Ceausescu's communist Romania. In Muller's world, true sentiments are crushed by Securitate spies, both real and imagined. People who've managed to find a modicum of happiness are quickly discovered by the omnipresent communist state security apparatus, which swiftly and expertly extinguishes joy and contentment. In Muller's world, everyone is continually on edge and the only solution to survival...more

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Jan 30, 2011 Christopher Nelson rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Maybe because the book takes place in Romania, a land foreign to me, or maybe because it's written by a native of that country but a minority German, that makes this book so strange and dislocated. But its the author herself, her narrative, at times surrealist, playing and challenging. The book takes place back behind the iron curtain before it's fall. A repressive government that monitors its citizens and their desires. But what of this government? What of the citizens? Where does surveillance...more

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Jul 23, 2012 Cristina rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Uma escrita sensivel e crua....

Herta Müller , escritora alemã de origem romena, Prémio Nobel da Literatura em 2009. Herta é uma sobrevivente da Weltliteratur, publicou 24 livros (os dois primeiros em Bucareste) até 2009, tendo recebido igual número de prémios. Este livro descreve o tempo de mentira do quotidiano da Roménia social-fascista: dias cinzentos, flashbacks pejados de recordações atrozes (como quando Lilli é esventrada por cães), ironia “romena”... Como provam vários episódios, a coreog...more Uma escrita sensivel e crua....

Herta Müller , escritora alemã de origem romena, Prémio Nobel da Literatura em 2009. Herta é uma sobrevivente da Weltliteratur, publicou 24 livros (os dois primeiros em Bucareste) até 2009, tendo recebido igual número de prémios. Este livro descreve o tempo de mentira do quotidiano da Roménia social-fascista: dias cinzentos, flashbacks pejados de recordações atrozes (como quando Lilli é esventrada por cães), ironia “romena”... Como provam vários episódios, a coreografia do medo não tem limites.

crítica do planeta dos livros de Mário Rufino- http://oplanetalivro.blogspot.pt/2011...

To my world friends:
The slim novel takes place on a single tram ride. The unnamed female narrator, who works in a state factory making clothes, has been summoned to appear "at ten sharp" for the latest in an increasing number of interrogations by Major Albu. Her crime? Putting handwritten notes in the back pockets of 10 white linen suits being shipped to Italy that said, "Marry me" and signed with her name and address. Another note was found in three pair of trousers bound for Sweden saying, "Best wishes from the dictatorship." The narrator claims she was not responsible for them or additional notes Albu claims were intended for Norway. She believes they were planted by her supervisor as revenge for her refusing to continue to see him after an ill-advised sexual affair while together on a business trip.

Although the tram ride takes 90 minutes, her various observations and the internal monologue they spark cover the breadth of her life. We learn about her past, her friends 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.

She believes there are four possible ways for life to play out. "The first and the best: don't get summoned and don't go mad, like most people." The second is to not get summoned but lose your mind anyway. The third is to get summoned and go mad. The fourth is to get summoned but not go mad. Although the narrator believes she is in that fourth category, questions may occasionally arise. That morning, in fact, she observes "there's nothing to think about, because I myself am nothing, apart from being summoned."

The Appointment allows the reader to ultimately piece together a fairly full understanding of the narrator's past and her experiences. It is, however, far from a linear journey. Even more so than most internal monologues, hers is quite scattershot. Her thoughts and memories jump from one fragment or tale to something she sees on the tram or out the window to another fragment of memory, rarely having any chronological order. As such, it echoes the description of Müller's prose work used by the presenter at her Nobel Prize ceremony: there is "no epic line, no plot with beginning and end."(less)

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Feb 08, 2012 Eva Stachniak rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I have wanted to read Herta Muller for some time, and have finally settled on The Appointment.
It is a serious, dark novel, a fitting testimony to Ceausescu's Rumania. The story slowly but firmly transports the reader into the world of secret interrogations, fear, entrapment, and betrayal.
Muller is a subdued writer. She adds pain slowly, mixes it with growing fear, until the reader becomes one with her character who so desperately fights for her shreds of dignity. The novel never loses its touch...more

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Dec 26, 2009 Dawn rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I gave this 3 stars when it probably should be 2 because I think the problem is me, not the book. This is a disjointed account of life in Romania under the totalitarian regime of Ceausescu. It tells the story of a young woman fired from a factory for putting notes into suits destined for Italy, asking the men who would buy the suits to marry her and get her out of Romania.

Most of the story is told as recollections she has on her tram trip into town for an appoitment with the Secret Police who h...more

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Aug 02, 2011 Rachel rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I really tried to like this book. I guess I'm not as astute a reader as I like to pretend to be. The stream-of-consciousness montage of the narrator's past was at times compelling. At times the writing was exquisite. But I just got bogged down by the lack of a cohesive plot, and I found the narrator to be a pretty irritating character. I was determined to read until the bitter end to find out what happens to the protagonist only finish the final sentence and have no idea what the heck the ending...more

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Jan 05, 2010 Janet rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

So far I don't find this as absorbing a book as the Land of Green Plums, the first HM book I'd read, ten or more years ago... as an icy plunge into life under one of the worst of the Eastern Bloc regimes, Ceausescu's Romania... this one is emotionally drier, the flatness of life where you're the only one who cares about your own life and sometimes not even that. Where great loves and friendships must be kept at arm's length in the the heart so not to rip you to shreds when they are endangered or...more So far I don't find this as absorbing a book as the Land of Green Plums, the first HM book I'd read, ten or more years ago... as an icy plunge into life under one of the worst of the Eastern Bloc regimes, Ceausescu's Romania... this one is emotionally drier, the flatness of life where you're the only one who cares about your own life and sometimes not even that. Where great loves and friendships must be kept at arm's length in the the heart so not to rip you to shreds when they are endangered or lost. The protagonist is a girl eventually fired from her factory job when she's informed on by her immediate boss/coworker-- with whom she has to keep working after he's informed on her--that she's sewed notes into the pockets of the suits heading for Italy and 'her Marcellos', "marry me." We come to like her drunken, vulnerable second husband as we see him tormented by his factory co-workers and perhaps beset by political police--is an accident just an accident? And see the compromised lives of her family and relationships with her exasperated first husband... how the despair and also passion that springs up through the cracks distorts these lives... all as she rides to her appointment for interrogation on the tram. My biggest complaint is that we lose sight of this, the horror of it, --the character's ability to mentally range throughout the events of her current and more distant life seem to indicate less fear than an attitude of 'nuisance' about this coming appointment. So the flatness of the writing, while psychologically apt, a woman trapped in such a claustrophobic world and trying to stay sane, works against the story's ability to involve us. Much must be read between the lines. Yet the writing is superb. I give it four stars so far
**********
Finished it, and it definitely takes on both emotional weight and narrative speed as it heads down the home stretch. We do feel her peril, her boyfriend's peril, the loathing of family and the trap of politics, of nation. Well worth staying with it.
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Oct 29, 2009 John rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

"The Appointment" is a first-person novel set in Romania during the reign of the communist dictator Nicolai Ceausescu, a time and a place the author knows firsthand.
The appointment is at 10 a.m. The narrator -- whose name we are never told -- has been summoned by a major in the secret police. He can require her presence whenever he wants, because she has been fired from her job at a clothing factory for placing notes in 10 pairs of pants being shipped to Italy asking the men who receive the note...more "The Appointment" is a first-person novel set in Romania during the reign of the communist dictator Nicolai Ceausescu, a time and a place the author knows firsthand.
The appointment is at 10 a.m. The narrator -- whose name we are never told -- has been summoned by a major in the secret police. He can require her presence whenever he wants, because she has been fired from her job at a clothing factory for placing notes in 10 pairs of pants being shipped to Italy asking the men who receive the note to take her away to Italy and marry her. Technically, she wasn't fired for those notes but for three other notes in clothing bound for Sweden that say, "Greetings from the dictatorship." She tells the reader that she didn't write those notes, but she might be lying. The narrator is not an entirely trustworthy person (neither is anyone else in this novel).
The interrogator says those notes to the Italians make her a prostitute. She denies this. She didn't want money, she only wanted to marry the first Italian who responded. And if that didn't work out, she would marry another Italian, because "after all, there's no shortage of Italians in Italy."
Having recently been in Italy, I can testify to the truth of that statement. There also are quite a few Romanians in Italy, for that matter.
When the narrator is summoned she comes. She knows if she doesn't come voluntarily, she will be taken, and she will never return to the apartment in a leaning tower that she shares with a heavy-drinking boyfriend.
Muller's Romania is a dreary place, filled with woebegone people, secret police, spies and schemers. And they are all very poor, so poor that they can't even afford quotation marks and question marks -- or at least there are none in this novel.
Perhaps now that Muller has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, she'll be able to afford quotation marks and question marks. Or she might say: I've gotten this far without them, why bother now. Do you think she will.
In one sense, "The Appointment" reminded me of the book I read just before it, Joseph Conrad's "Nostromo." As with "Nostromo," "The Appointment" jumps around chronologically, and Muller does so abruptly -- so that you have to be careful or you lose track of where you are in the story. Which appointment? Which trip to the flea market? Her husband or her boyfriend? The back stories appear in a jumble.
Along the way, Muller tells you a lot about life in communist Romania, and, really, none of it is pleasant, although some of it is told with ironic humor:
"She wasn't that dear a wife to him, she knew that. He had a mistress my age in the garden shop, a specialist in mites and aphids. Since no one could say her official title of Comrade Engineer for Combating Parasites in Cultivated Plants without laughing, everyone called her Comrade Louse Inspector." (less)

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About Herta Müller

Herta 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...more

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Quotes from The Appointment

“Everyday brought me further away from other people, I had been placed out of the world's sight, as if in a cupboard, and I hoped it would stay that way. I developed a yearning for being alone, unkempt, untended.” — 3 people liked it

“Even judges' children hear something about the world, they go to the Black Sea like everyone in the country. They look out and feel the same urge to go somewhere, feel it tugging at them from head to toe. You don't have to be particularly bad off to think: This can't be a the life I get. The judges' children know as well as Lilli and me that the same sky that looks down on the border guards stretches all the way to Italy or Canada, where things are better than here. One way or the other, the attempt will be made, whether sooner or later, in this way or that.” — 2 people liked it

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The Appointment: A Novel

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