The Hunger Angel: A Novel [FIRST EDITION, FIRST PRINTING]

Muller, Herta

Published by Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt, New York, 2012

About this Item

As new condition black boards with silver spine lettering contained in an as new condition non price-clipped color illustrated dust jacket. Includes Afterword; Translator's Note; About the Author and About the Translator. As per the copyright page: "First U.S. Edition 2012" with the number line beginning at number 1. Translated by Philip Boehm. Winner of the Nobel Prize. "A masterly new novel from the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize, hailed for depicting the "landscape of the dispossessed" with "the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose" (Nobel Committee)". "It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke-processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless calculus of hunger that governed the labor camp: 1 shovel load = 1 gram of bread. In her new novel, Nobel laureate Herta Muller calls upon her unique combination of poetic intensity and detached precision to conjure the distorted world of the labor camp. She has given Leo the language to express the inexpressible, as hunger sharpens his senses into an acuity that is both hallucinatory and profound. In scene after disorienting scene, the most ordinary objects accrue tender poignancy as they acquire new purpose - a gramophone box serves as a suitcase, a handkerchief becomes a talisman, an enormous piece of pipe functions as a lovers' trysting place. The heart is reduced to a pump, the breath mechanized to the rhythm of a swinging shovel, and coal, sand, and cement have a will of their own. Hunger becomes an insatiable angel who haunts the camp, but also a bare-knuckled sparring partner, delivering blows that keep Leo feeling the rawest connection to life. Muller has distilled Leo's struggle into words of breathtaking intensity that take us on a journey far beyond one man's physical travails and into the depths of the human soul." - from the inner front jacket flap. Seller Inventory # 003777

Bibliographic Details

Title: The Hunger Angel: A Novel [FIRST EDITION, ...

Publisher: Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt, New York

Publication Date: 2012

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: As New

Dust Jacket Condition: As New

Edition: 1st Edition