The Passport
ByPublisher Description
From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2009
'Just as the father in the house in which we live is our father, so Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu is the father of our country. And just as the mother in the house in which we live is our mother, so Comrade Elena Ceausescu is the mother of our country. Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu is the father of our children. All the children love comrade Nicolae and comrade Elena, because they are their parents.'
The Passport is a beautiful, haunting novel whose subject is a German village in Romania caught between the stifling hopelessness of Ceausescu's dictatorship and the glittering temptations of the West. Stories from the past are woven together with the problems Windisch, the village miller, faces after he applies for permission to migrate to West Germany.
Herta Müller describes with poetic attention the dreams and superstitions, conflicts and oppression of a forgotten region, the Banat, in the Danube Plain. In sparse, lyrical language, Herta Müller captures the forlorn plight of a trapped people.
This edition is translated by Martin Chalmers, with a new foreword by Paul Bailey.
Also by Herta Müller: Nadirs, The Land of Green Plums, The Appointment, and The Hunger Angel.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Passport Reviews
“Herta Müller’s THE PASSPORT is a short novel that centres the villagers of a small German village in Romania; its people want to escape, to flee the nation’s dictatorship and hopefully find a new home in a country that may be more accepting of them. The book is written in brief sentences, in flashes of images, in fragments and colours that blend into each other. The writing is distant, hazy, bleak. Hypnotic but also a little confusing. The development of colours and images and the way they transform into different things remind me a little of my experience reading K-Ming Chang’s Bestiary, if even more resistant to reading and sense. There’s a certain poetry to the staccatoed writing, to the way images recur and become symbols.
What do I make of this slim novel? It wasn’t easy to get through, and even when I was concentrating, I lost where I was or I lost the thread of the narrative, because there is no order and no chronology here. There is only survival, and characters across time doing what they can to survive, even if it is in exchange for their dignity, their humanity. The most lucid parts of the book, for me, were when Windisch and his wife argue about whether or not they should barter their daughter’s body for a document that will allow them to emigrate, followed by the wife’s history of sex work to survive before her marriage, and how her daughter is doomed to parallel her. I thought of the way women’s bodies during times like war become a currency, the way exile and oppression means there is little choice if you want to make it to the next day. Hypnotic and bleak.”
About Herta Muller
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