A challenging book about Romania under Ceauşescu where suspicion and secret police are slowly driving most of the citizens mad including the narrator. Had it not been a book club selection, I would not have persevered. I am glad I finished but reluctant to start another by this Nobel-award winning author. Her imagination and prose mirror well the narrator's distraction and fear and resignment. It would be interesting to read in the original German. ( )

Communicated apathy so effectively that it failed to engage me. ( )

L'incubo continua anche se il conducator è morto e sepolto! ( )

The unnamed narrator of this novel is taking a tram journey from her home to the office where she has been summoned - yet again - to be interviewed about her alleged crimes against the Romanian state. Along the way, she reflects on the other passengers in the tram, on her current and previous husbands, her family and in-laws, her neighbours, and the circumstances that led her to the point of making a small and rather futile gesture against the authority of the régime. Her observation of the small details of everyday life is almost brutally sharp in its focus, as the stream-of-consciousness builds up a composite picture of the way living under a corrupt authoritarian government distorts and coarsens everything in life, down to the most trivial level, with madness, alcohol and suicide appearing as the only viable ways out.

It's an interesting contrast with Herztier, the other of her novels that I've read: there the character was a young intellectual who was driven to write, whilst here it's a woman who strongly distrusts the written word (or anything else that leaves a record), but has nonetheless started to note down details of the physical world around her because her faith in reality is so shaken that she no longer trusts that there will be the same number of lampposts along the street from one day to the next. Magnificent, but very painful writing.

(I wonder why it is that Müller's titles so rarely survive translation to English? The plain ones become extravagant - Herztier -> The land of green plums, Atemschaukel -> The hunger angel - and the extravagant ones plain Heute wär ich mir lieber nicht begegnet -> The Appointment, Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt -> The Passport) ( )

A conversation on Twitter late one night after I had imbibed a portion or two of wine turned to laureates of the Nobel Prize for Literature (writers, not fucking folk singers), and female laureates in particular, and, well, before I knew it, I’d gone and bought a couple books by female Nobel laureates on the web site of a very large online retailer. The first was this, The Appointment by Herta Müller, a German writer who, despite her name is, er, actually Romanian. Her family belonged to the German-speaking minority in Romania, but in 1987 she was given permission to leave and settle in Germany after many years of trying. Her most successful novel to date has been 2009’s The Hunger Angel, and that same year she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Until prompted to look her up by the aforementioned Twitter conversation, I had not even heard of Müller or her fiction. But I bought The Appointment, and read it on a trip to, and from, Leeds one Saturday. The Appointment was published in Germany – she is, despite her origin, probably best considered a German writer – but the novel is set in Romania, as indeed is apparently much of her fiction. The title refers to the meeting the narrator has with Albu, a major in the Romanian secret police. The narrator used to work in a garment factory, whose products were mostly destined for export – and in a shipment of trousers destined for Italy, she hid a series of notes, asking to be rescued, through marriage, by an Italian man. But the notes were found and she was reported to management. Unfortunately, she had a bad relationship with her manager, and when a later series of notes were found, critical of the regime, she was blamed and sacked. And forced to attend interrogation sessions with Major Albu. It’s grim stuff. I’ve visited Romania – it’s a lovely country, full of lovely people – but the Ceaucescu regime was brutal and Müller pulls no punches in depicting how it impacted the lives of ordinary people. I’m in two minds whether to read more Müller – she writes in a style I like, present tense and slightly distant, and while I’m not especially keen on first-person narratives it works extremely well here; but the story is punishingly hard to read. Having said that, writing about the book for this blog post is sort of persuading me to try something else by her… ( )