The Land of Green Plums (German: Herztier)
This is my favorite novel I’ve read this year. An irresistible blend of prose and poetry - pure perfection. The skill of reading between the lines is pure necessity. Behind her short and precious sentences, an avalanche of feelings emerges.
The author is a member of the German minority in Romania and she writes from the perspective of her own experiences during her student days in Timisoara.
In medias res, are friendships in dangerous times. Mutual protection and trust grow even in times of greatest danger. The staged suicides in a rigid totalitarian political regime are a reminder of some distant and forgotten times. Victims are people whose behavior does not fit into the given framework of society. Here death is not dramatized but accepted as a normal occurrence. Death itself tells us nothing about dying. Is survival the purpose of life? Should we hold our breath, before life or death suffocates us.
"Where you can think and write, you can walk differently."
Herta Müller is one of the most important contemporary German writers, winner of numerous European literary awards, and this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Born in 1953 in Romania, she lived under the Ceausescu regime which she criticized in her works.
See you on Tuesday!
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