The Land of Green Plums

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The Land of Green Plums
Cover of US hardback edition
Author	Herta Müller
Original title	Herztier
Translator	Michael Hofmann
Cover artist	Jan Saudek
Country	USA
Language	English
Genre(s)	Novel, Bildungsroman
Publisher	Metropolitan Books
Publication date	1993
Published in English	15 November 1996
Media type	Print (Hardback and Paperback)
Pages	256

The Land of Green Plums (German: Herztier) is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Herta Müller, published in 1993 by Rowohlt Verlag. The novel portrays four young people living in and fleeing from the totalitarian police state under the Soviet-imposed communist dictatorship in Romania. The narrator is a young woman of the German minority much like the author herself. Müller wrote it, she said, "in memory of my Romanian friends who were killed under the Ceauşescu regime."^[1]

It was published in an English translation by Michael Hofmann in 1996, by Metropolitan Books in NY. A new edition in English was published by Hydra Books/Northwestern University Press in 1998. The English translation of the novel won the prestigious International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the largest prize for a single work of fiction published in English, in 1998.^[2]

Following the announcement of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Herta Müller, The Land of Green Plums entered the bestseller list on Amazon.com.^[3]

1 Plot
2 Critical notes
3 Trivia
4 References

[edit] Plot

The unnamed narrator describes her life in Romania before leaving for Germany. The novel is organized chronologically and begins in a college dormitory, with reflections of her life at home dispersed throughout the novel; it ends after the narrator and one of her friends have emigrated to Germany.

The first character introduced to the reader is a young girl called Lola, who shares a room with five other girls, including the narrator, in a college dormitory. Lola's experiences are preserved in her diary, and she relates how she finds an escape from the totalitarian world of school and society by riding the buses at night and having brutish, anonymous sex with men returning home from factory work. She also has an affair with the gym teacher, and soon joins the Communist Party. This first part of the book ends when Lola is found hanging in the closet; she has left her diary in the narrator's suitcase.

Having supposedly committed suicide and thus betrayed her country and her party, Lola is publicly denounced in a school ceremony in which every student joins. Soon after, the narrator shares Lola's diary with three male friends, Edgar, George, and Kurt; Lola's life becomes an escape for them as they attend college in an unnamed city, and they refuse to accept the official conclusion that Lola's death was indeed suicide. The four are all from German-speaking communities; all receive mail from their mothers in which the mothers complain about their various illnesses and how their children's subversiveness is causing them trouble; all have fathers who were members of the SS during World War II.

The diary, and other documents and mildly subversive photographs,^[4] are hidden in the well of a deserted summerhouse in town. Very quickly it becomes clear that an officer of the Securitate, Captain Pjele, is interested in the four and begins regular interrogations of them. Their possessions are searched and their mail opened, and they are threatened by the Captain and his dog, also called Pjele.

After graduation, the four go their separate ways but stay in contact through writing letters and regular visits. The letters are coded to convey whether they are being followed or have been interrogated, and contain hairs to indicate whether they have been opened or not. The jobs they take are relatively menial: Kurt works in a slaughterhouse as a supervisor, for instance, and the narrator translates German manuals in a factory. A fifth member, Tereza, comes to play an important role in the narrator's life even as it becomes clear that she is partly acting on Pjele's orders. Regularly, there are accounts of people killed in their attempts to flee the country.

The lives of all five go downhill one way or another, and they find themselves conforming to the regime's demands even as they lose their jobs for apparently political reasons. Kurt, for example, had long refused to join the workers in their communal drinking of the slaughtered animals' blood, but finally caves and becomes like them. They begin to discuss fleeing the country, and Georg is the first to do so; weeks after he arrives in Germany, he commits suicide by jumping out the window of a Frankfurt hotel. The narrator and Edgar likewise acquire passports and go to Germany, where they regularly receive death threats. Kurt remains in Romania, no longer working, and is found hanged. The novel ends the way it begins: "When we don't speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves."^[4]

[edit] Critical notes

[edit] Autobiography

The novel is partly autobiographical; like her narrator, Müller also hails from the German-speaking minority in Romania, the Banat Swabians. Trained as a teacher, she lost her position after refusing to cooperate with the Securitate and left for Germany, in 1987.^[5]

[edit] Allegory

The novel approaches allegory,^[6] and many of the details in the novel are considered allegorical, such as the green plums of the title. Mothers warn their children not to eat of the green, unripe plums; if children do eat them, they will die. Police officers, however, are regularly shown gorging themselves on the plums: "The officer's [sic] lack of constraint in engulfing the fruit parallels the remorseless persecution of the human race" under Nicolae Ceauşescu.^[7] The green plums also suggest childhood, or regression into childhood: "The narrator watches the Romanian police guards in the streets of the city as they greedily pocket green plums.... 'They reverted to childhood, stealing plums from village trees.' Ms. Muller's vision of a police state manned by plum thieves reads like a kind of fairy tale on the mingled evils of gluttony, stupidity and brutality."^[8]

[edit] Characters

The characters--especially Edgar, George, and Kurt--are not developed in great detail, as many critics have noted, due to Müller's intentions: "Characterization is not the point here. Müller is primarily a poet," and this poetic interest likewise is said to explain the lack of chapter organization and of transitional phrases.^[9]

[edit] Language

Müller's language, even in the original German, is dense and startling (one reviewer called it "shifty, blurred"), and this is in part caused by her membership of the Banat Swabian minority in Romania, a relatively small group isolated from other German-speaking groups, though another reason given is that her peculiar use of language is a sign of resistance to authority and conformity: "This [Banat Swabian German] is German that is spoken in a vacuum, cut off from the air-supply of German speakers in Europe. But it also relects Herta Müller's effort to create a private language of resistance, a language that negates the totalitarian repression of the narrator's world. For Herztier is a novel about language and the challenge of finding the words to offer personal testimony."^[10] According to Larry Wolff, reviewing the book for The NY Times, the poetic quality of the language is essentially connected to its author's objective: "the author seeks to create a sort of poetry out of the spiritual and material ugliness of life in Communist Romania."^[8] Critics have generally shown appreciation for the novel's language, as did Nicholas Lezard, writing in The Guardian:

The prose, while simple at the level of the sentence (and we can safely assume that Hofmann's translation is very faithful to the original), is shifty, blurred, to the point where at times we are left unsure as to what exactly is going on – a deliberate flight from causation, quite understandable in a country where everyone (even, we learn, the horses) has been driven mad by fear.^[11]

Though the novel's language, and Müller's language in general, is praised for its precision--Peter Englund, secretary of the Swedish Academy, noted her "extreme precision with words"^[1]--many things are left unsaid. As a reviewer for The Australian noted, the narrator is never named, the words "totalitarian" and "liberty" never appear in the book, and even Ceausescu, usually referred to as the "dictator," is named only once^[12]--and when he is named, it is only because one of the characters (a Jewish WWII survivor) notes how the greeting "ciao" is also the first syllable of the dictator's name.^[13]

[edit] Trivia

The novel is a favorite of Mohammad-Ali Abtahi, the Iranian pro-democracy activist, who read it (in the Persian translation by Gholamhossein Mirza-Saleh^[14]) shortly after being released from prison in 2009.^[15]