Herta Müller

[Bjorn]

Turns out we don't have a thread for her, and since she's being discussed... Maybe Mirabell or someone else who's read her can add something? Going by what's available over here, I'd love to hear if Der Fuchs war damals schon der J?ger or Herztier are any good?

Biography (shamelessly stolen from wikipedia)

Herta M?ller (born August 17, 1953) is a Romanian-born German novelist and essayist.

She was born in Niţchidorf (Nitzkydorf), Timiş County, the daughter of Swabian farmers. She took German studies and Romanian literature at the Timişoara University.

In 1976, M?ller began working as a translator for an engineering company, but was dismissed in 1979 for her refusal to cooperate with the Securitate, the Communist regime's secret police. Initially, she made a living by teaching kindergarten and giving private German lessons. Her first book was published in Romania (in German) in 1982, and appeared only as a censored version, as with most publications of this time.

In 1987, M?ller left for Germany with her husband. Over the following years, she received many lectureships at universities in Germany and abroad. She currently lives in Berlin. M?ller received membership at the German Academy for Writing and Poetry in 1995, and other positions followed. In 1997, she withdrew from the PEN centre of Germany in protest of its merge with its former German Democratic Republic branch.

Bibliography:

• Niederungen ("Lowlands"), Bucharest 1982
• Dr?ckender Tango ("Oppressive Tango"), Bucharest 1984
• Der Mensch ist ein gro?er Fasan auf der Welt ("Man Is a Big Sucker in the World"), Berlin 1986
• Barf??iger Februar ("Barefoot February"), Berlin 1987
• Reisende auf einem Bein ("Traveller on One Leg"), Berlin 1989
• The Passport, 1989
• Wie Wahrnehmung sich erfindet ("How Perception Invents Itself"), Paderborn 1990
• Der Teufel sitzt im Spiegel ("The Devil is Sitting in the Mirror"), Berlin 1991
• Der Fuchs war damals schon der J?ger ("Even Back Then, the Fox Was the Hunter), Reinbek by Hamburg 1992
• Eine warme Kartoffel ist ein warmes Bett ("A Warm Potato Is a Warm Bed), Hamburg 1992
• Der W?chter nimmt seinen Kamm ("The Guard Takes His Comb"), Reinbek by Hamburg 1993
• Angekommen wie nicht da ("Arrived As If Not There"), Lichtenfels 1994
• Herztier ("Heart Animal"), Reinbek bei Hamburg 1994
• Hunger und Seide ("Hunger and Silk"), Reinbek by Hamburg 1995
• In der Falle ("In a Trap"), G?ttingen 1996
• Heute w?r ich mir lieber nicht begegnet ("Today I Would Rather Not Have Met Myself"), Reinbek by Hamburg 1997
• Der fremde Blick oder das Leben ist ein Furz in der Laterne ("The Foreign View, or Life Is a Fart in a Lantern"), G?ttingen 1999
• The Land of Green Plums, 1999
• Im Haarknoten wohnt eine Dame ("A Lady Lives in the Hair Knot"), Reinbek by Hamburg 2000
• Heimat ist das, was gesprochen wird ("Home Is What Is Spoken There"), Blieskastel 2001
• Der K?nig verneigt sich und t?tet ("The King Bows and Kills), Munich (and elsewhere) 2003
• Die blassen Herren mit den Mokkatassen ("The Pale Gentlemen with their Espresso Cups"), Munich (and elsewhere) 2005

Links:

• Wikipedia (English)
• Wikipedia (Deutsch)

[Eric]

I'm glad you started this thread, Bj?rn. I haven't read a word by her, but given her brushes with the Securitate, she does strike me as someone who has experienced a repressive r?gime at first hand, and is sincere:

Herta M?ller: Securitate in all but name - signandsight

There is no harm in stealing from the Wikipedia, if this furthers our knowledge of an author. The Wikipedia has open access.

[Galatea92]

That's impressively horrifying. The falsification workshop is particularly scary. I'm not sure I would have been as courageous as she seems to have been.

[Stewart]

Herta M?ller has today been confirmed as the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.

[Heteronym]

The Nobel keeps betting on obscurity.

There is a reason why names like Philip Roth, Milan Kundera, Amos Oz keep coming up every year. Perhaps it's because they really deserve it.

I was watching the commentaries by a Portuguese writer on the choice of Herta M?ller, and she made some interesting points:

1) in the history of the Nobel Literature Prize, only a handful of women have won the award, and the Academy has been awarding women like crazy this decade to fill quotas and avoid being called mysoginist;

2) the writer didn't have a fine impression of M?ller's writing and argued that when men are awarded, it tends to be to writers with real talent; when it comes to women, it seems any woman will do; this risks giving the impression women's writing isn't as good as men's;

3) the Academy's criteria - "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed" - is so ridiculously vague it could describe any writer.

This was a pretty violent criticism.

For my part I can only say Mrs. M?ller does not interest me in the least. I was waiting to know the winner before going book shopping today, but I'll be buying Coetzee and Naipaul instead. And maybe some Angela Carter.

[Eric]

I am perfectly satisfied that Herta M?ller has won the prize. I was amused at the pomp, circumstance, and suppressed hysteria at the announcement at the white circus door of the Swedish Academy...

Nobels litteraturpris 2009 Herta M?ller | SvD

...but I'm happy that someone like M?ller ("the muller woman") has won it.

I just do not recognise the description of "obscure". I had not read anything by her before yesterday afternoon, but I thought I might like her. I like what she writes about. Even now, I've only three pages yesterday - nothing today. But after giving it to an flakey Austrian Communist a few years ago, the committee has now given it to someone who shows the horrible ways that the Ceausescu system treated people.

Obscurity is often a way of saying: if I've never heard of her, she's OBSCURE. Would that more obscure writers won major prizes! One Portuguese commentary cannot disguise the fact that M?ller may even be a good writer. For my part, I can only say that some opinions do not interest me in the least, to paraphrase Heteronym. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. I started reading one of her books quite at random yesterday (it was the only thing of hers they had in the library), and will comment in due course whether she is good stylistically, as opposed to politically. No one is paying me to say she's brilliant, but nor do I want to write her off, quite wilfully, as "obscure". No reader of serious literature in Germany, a country of some 80 million inhabitants, would have regarded this immigrant writer as "obscure", even before the prize.

[Mirabell]

About Herta M?ller (Part 1) shigekuni.

[promtbr]

Thanks for the excellent intro Marcel!

Sounds as if M?llers pool is deep and inviting, enough for multiple dives. I am so going to meet the delivery truck driver at the door who will hand me the amazon box this afternoon with The Land of Green Plums inside.

[Liam]

...the Ceausescu system...

Actually, it's Ceauşescu.

[Eric]

You're correction is perfectly correct, Liam. However, while I can write a whole host of diacritic marks using the Alt + system, I can't get the Romanian sh-sound without first going to a Romanian text online, then copying the letter, then pasting it in the word. I hope you did notice the more common and more grievous fault: people writing Ceaucescu, which someone did here - and you didn't berate him for his typo / bout of laziness. If you know an Alt + code for the ş, ţ (as in Niţchidorf [pron. Nitsky Dorf]) do tell me. I've managed to reproduce them here now, but had to find texts such as the following to nick the letters from:

Nobel pentru Romania Casa in care a locuit Herta Muller in Banat nationalizata de statul roman

The beginning of the title, as far as I know, means: "The Nobel for Romania". But the rest of it is too difficult for me. Suffice it to say that Romania is now claiming part-credit for M?ller's win. And I guess that the second half of the title means something like: "The house in which Herta M?ller lived in Banat has been nationalised by the Romanian state". One interesting feature of the Romanian language is that it has a definite article tacked onto the end of the noun, as in the Scandinavian languages.

[Clarissa]

The Nobel prize committee should get out more | Books | guardian.co.uk

Guardian article re. Eurocentric

[miercuri]

Your translation of the title is very accurate.
The rest of the article goes on about how the house Mueller lived in was nationalised in '87 when she fled the country. I really can't see the point of this article, but yes, it seems that Romania is claiming part-credit for the win. Romanian literary circles are very much frustrated with the fact that we have no Nobel laureate of our own and this must come as a partial consolation. They will have to make-do with it for a while, until one day when hopefully, our pride and joy Mircea Cărtărescu wins it.
However, I can't consider Herta Mueller of Romanian writer. She is bilingual but writes solely in German and she has never translated her works herself, the way Nabokov of others did it. She is a German-language author for me.
Several of her novels were translated to Romanian by Nora Iuga, probably the best German-to-Romanian translator and if I am not mistaking, a close friend of Herta Mueller's. I will check with my library to see what they have.

edit: it seems that there is a book of poems by her, written in Romanian, published in 2005.

[Heteronym]

No bookshop has Herta M?ller's books available. Usually bookshops use the Nobel win to increase sales on a writer, but this year it's like nobody won. My always reliable Book Depository also come out empty handed.

Does Herta M?ller exist or is she just a spook?

[Daniel del Real]

Maybe it is another heteronym by Mirabell. He's the only one that has read her

Very interesting article Clarissa, and I totally agree with its content. I know the most advanced region regarding Literature is Europe, so it's ok they get most of the Nobel winners. But 19 years now without looking towards Spanish language, that is just sad for me, and for all the native speakers from the third most spoken language in the whole world with 329 million.

[Damian Kelleher]

Reading blog posts from American magazines and regular people is a wonderful exercise in the Le Who? business of last year. Happily, it seems the comments are more accepting than the articles, but its really quite disturbing how inward-looking these American publications are.

Is an international prize suddenly bad or wrong if a person from my country doesn't win it? I don't mind so much that an Australian author didn't win (I also think we don't have any valid contenders...), but my reaction isn't, then, to declare the prize out of touch.

This Pop Vox : Why the Nobel Prize in Literature Doesn't Really Matter is fairly interesting because, really, Le Clezio was huge in France before the award, and is now bigger. "It may, but, then again, you may wind up like last year's winner, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, who enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame and then fell off the radar." Whose radar? Newsweeks? And why does that radar matter in an international sense?

And then this isn't much better: http://shelf-life.ew.com/2009/10/08/...el-literature/ "I am, admittedly, a myopic American who?s poorly read in non-English-language literature (and only spottily read in English-language classics for that matter). But does the Nobel imprimatur really compel me to pore through the works of M?ller ? or last year?s comparably unfamiliar laureate, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Cl?zio? I think not. The Nobel ranks are cluttered with writers who?ve sunk into obscurity and irrelevance, sometimes deservedly so. Do Swedes still read the work of 1916 laureate Verner von Heidenstam? Does anyone think 1938 winner Pearl Buck was one of the top 100 writers of the 20th century?" Happily, one of the comments (from a list of generally good comments) points out that Heidenstam is read by every Swedish schoolchild, something that a good bout of research would surely have revealed.

But it seems that American exceptionalism is braying for blood, so off with her head before anyone has bothered to read her work.

I look forward to the book depository selling M?ller's work.

[beelzebubbles]

Thanks for the informative posts, Eric.

Heteronym, Amazon in the USA has two of Muller's novels, The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment available in English translation. There are even a few used ones available.

[Stiffelio]

Bjorn, you may want to edit your posting of M?ller's bibliography. Some of the titles are duplicated, probably due to some bizarre translations:

Der Mensch ist ein gro?er Fasan auf der Welt ("Man Is a Big Sucker in the World"), Berlin 1986

is the same book as

The Passport, 1989;

and

Herztier ("Heart Animal"), Reinbek bei Hamburg 1994

is the same as

The Land of Green Plums, 1999



On a more frivolous note: I just saw a brief presentation of Herta M?ller on a TV show. She's got rather beautiful eyes but she's reed skinny, verging on the anorexic

[Eric]

Thank-you Miercuri. We language-interested people do try to make some inspired guesses from languages in the same group, Romance languages in this case. I agree that the article is pretty pointless if that's all it says. But journalists like to be with it, even if they have nothing to say. I wonder what size of shoes Herta M?ller wears...

From what I've read, M?ller's ethno-cultural background is squarely the German-speaking Swabian minority from the Banat region of Romania. It's hard sometimes to pin down a writer who has such a complicated background. Analogously, Finland-Swedish writers who move to Sweden itself tend still to be regarded as "Finnish" writers, however erroneous that label is.

I presume that Heteronym is referring to bookshops in English-speaking countries. You have to be glad that the British online press actually has anything at all about her, as she didn't write in English. Clarissa has already found the Guardian article, while I have found a couple more:

Novelist Herta M?ller wins 2009 Nobel literature prize - Times Online

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Arts & Culture | Mueller wins Nobel literary prize

Profile: Herta Muller, winner 2009 Nobel prize for literature - Telegraph

German writer wins Nobel literature prize - News, Books - The Independent

So there are at least four British journos on her case. I suppose they have built up a dossier on her by now, like the Securitate used to do.

And the Germans themselves:

Nobelpreistr?gerin: Herta M?ller und der Makel des SS-Vaters - Nachrichten Kultur - WELT ONLINE

Literatur-Nobelpreis 2009 - Der Hunger - nur er frisst immer weiter - Kultur - sueddeutsche.de

Literaturnobelpreis f?r Herta M?ller: Mit der Tinte die Schatten vertreiben - Hintergr?nde - Feuilleton - FAZ.NET

09.10.2009: Herztier (Tageszeitung Neues Deutschland)

Stiffy: have you got beautiful eyes and are verging on the anorectic? Or are you a dumpy-saggy-wrinkled person like some writers also are? Or gorgeous, young, with rippling tits? Appearances are so important.

[Eric]

Interesting to see that Die Welt brings up the fact that M?ller's dad was in the SS while the Communist (beg pardon, you're supposed to say socialist) newspaper Neues Deutschland is quite positive about her win. If the Swedish Academy appears to be sucking up to the Germans, the Norwegians are obviously running out of oil as they're now sucking up to the Yanks by giving some obscure American the Peace Prize.

If you look at the Die Welt website regarding the Peace Prize, 0% agree with the fact that this particular American has won it, 50% don't know, and 50% say it was the wrong thing to do. I don't think similar voting on M?ller would be quite so polarised.

A longish and interesting article (in English) about Herta M?ller and the Securitate at:

http://print.signandsight.com/features/1910.html

And the Washington Post; not in the same league of informative sophistication:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...100800965.html

[Heteronym]

Heteronym, Amazon in the USA has two of Muller's novels, The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment available in English translation. There are even a few used ones available.

No, it's Book Depository or nothing!

Hopefully in a few weeks Portuguese translations will start showing up in bookstores.