The Hunger Angel (Signed First Edition)

Herta Muller

ISBN 10: 080509301X / ISBN 13: 9780805093018

Published by Metropolitan Books, New York, 2012

About this Item

NEW YORK: Metropolitan, 2012. First edition. First printing. Hardcover. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page (name only). Very fine in a very fine dust jacket. A pristine unread copy, opened only for signing. With mylar dust jacket protector. Defect-free, smoke-free. Shipped in sturdy box. The novel was nominated for the German Book Prize in 2009, and the author received the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year. This translation by Philip Boehm was nominated for the Best Translated Book Award (2013), and won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize (2013). Comes with a photocopy of her Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Seller Inventory # 2965

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Hunger Angel (Signed First Edition)
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books, New York
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 080509301X
• ISBN 13: 9780805093018
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New
• Dust Jacket Condition: New
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Nobel Prize Winner

About this title

Synopsis

A masterful 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 Prize 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 colony: one shovel load of coal is worth one gram of bread.

In her new novel, Nobel laureate Herta Müller calls upon her unique combination of poetic intensity and dispassionate precision to conjure the distorted world of the labor camp in all its physical and moral absurdity. 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 casing 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 snow 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.

Müller has distilled Leo's struggle into words of breathtaking intensity that take us on a journey far beyond the Gulag and into the depths of one man's soul.

About the Author

Herta Müller is the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the European Literature Prize. She is the author of, among other books, The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment. Born in Romania in 1953, Müller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceausescu's secret police. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin.