The Passport - Softcover

Herta Müller

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852421398 ISBN 13: 9781852421397

Publisher: Serpent's Tail, 1989

Synopsis

The German inhabitants of a dying village in Romania under Ceausescu's dictatorship, desperately try to get passports so that they can emigrate

About this title

About the Author

Herta Muller is the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature. She was born in Romania in 1953. After refusing to cooperate with Ceausescu's Securitate, she lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats before she was able to emigrate in 1987. She is the author of The Passport (1989) and Children of Ceausescu (2002) among other publications, and is the winner of Germany's most prestigious literary award, The Kleist Prize. Herta Muller now lives in Berlin

From the Back Cover

From the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature!
"A swift, stinging narrative, fable-like in its stoic concision and painterly detail." The Philadelphia Inquirer
The Passport is a beautiful, haunting novel whose subject is a German village in Romania caught between the stifling hopelessness of Ceausescu s dictatorship and the glittering temptations of the West. Stories from the past are woven together with the problems Windisch, the village miller, faces after he applies for permission to migrate to West Germany. Herta Müller (Herta Mueller) describes with poetic attention the dreams and superstitions, conflicts and oppression of a forgotten region, the Banat, in the Danube Plain. In sparse, poetic language, Muller captures the forlorn plight of a trapped people.

Reviews

This English-language debut by a Romanian-born West Berliner is remarkable for its stylistic purity. Muller's angry tale of an ethnic German anxious to emigrate from his stultifying Romanian village is relayed in deceptively straightforward sentences ("Katharina had sold her winter coat for ten slices of bread. Her stomach was a hedgehog. Every day Katharina picked a bunch of grass. The grass soup was warm and good") that pile up in striking patterns (later, "the second snow came. . . . The hedgehog stabbed"). Intently focused prose animates the parochial town with its corrupt power brokers, gamey folk songs and a tree reputed to have eaten its own apples, as well as the problematic relations among the central character, his embittered wife and their nubile daughter, who, like her mother before her during the war, is forced to grant sexual favors to men of privilege.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1852421398
• ISBN 13: 9781852421397
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 93