A man removes snow from the bust of Ceausescu in Podari, southern Romania, December 2009 (below) and Herta Müller

The Land of Green Plums By Herta Müller, Granta, Rs 399

In her Nobel lecture, delivered on December 7, 2009, the winner of the prize for literature, Herta Müller, talked of the “vicious circle” of words. She narrated how she would spell out in words what she could not express in speech. “I reacted to the deathly fear with a thirst for life. A hunger for words. Nothing but the whirl of words could grasp my condition.”

“Fear” refers to the reign of terror in Romania in the 1980s under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu. Müller was born in Romania to a German-speaking minority community that often faced persecution during Ceausescu’s communist regime. Müller herself was sacked from her job when she refused to spy for the secret police, the Securitate; her books were banned in Romania for criticizing the dictatorship, and one of her closest friends committed ‘suicide’, probably a euphemism for murder carried out by the police. The Land of Green Plums, translated by Michael Hofmann from the original Herztier in 1998, is about the plight of a group of four friends, Kurt, Georg, Edgar and the female narrator, whom the secret police chose to hound. Müller felt that it was her “duty” to write the book “in memory of my Romanian friends who were killed under the Ceausescu regime”. Not surprisingly, the prevailing atmosphere of The Land of Green Plums is one of overwhelming gloom, relieved, and enhanced, at times by the poetry of Müller’s language.

“When we don’t speak, said Edgar, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.” So begins The Land of Green Plums, and the excruciating attempt to verbalize the inexpressible that is this novel. Müller dissipates her intense frustration, fear and anger at being trapped in a system whose ways are impossible to justify by speaking in the language of symbols. Each emotion is concretized in an object, whose name is repeated like an incantation from the beginning to the end, creating a sort of spell, which keeps reality at bay while, at the same time, vivifying it.

Disgust takes the form of a slaughterhouse and its blood-guzzling workers, sycophancy acquires the taste of unripe green plums (which cause stomach cramps), life under the dictator is the dead wristwatch that stopped ticking long ago, while love is the “damn stupid plant” that even hatred cannot stop from growing. Death becomes a “sack” — “I have the feeling that whenever someone dies he leaves behind a sack of words.” Together the words create a dark cell in which the narrative is imprisoned, and one can guess what Müller was getting at when she spoke of the vicious circle of words.

One of the most disturbing images in the novel is that of the slaughterhouse. Kurt goes to work there and keeps describing it in all its gory detail to the narrator. “The workers drank warm blood when they slaughtered the animals....Their wives and children are accomplices, Kurt said. The wives use the stiff cowtails for bottle brushes, and the children get the supple ones to play with.” It is this legacy of violence that is the unique gift of any dictatorship, whether that of the communist Ceausescu or of his fascist counterpart, the Führer. Rejecting it is not easy, as that involves breaking away from the comfort of accepted ways of thinking as well as the courage to challenge the pressures of power. There are also deeper subtleties involved in the process. The narrator, the daughter of a SS-man, had virulently denounced her father as the maker of graveyards, and yet had found herself enmeshed, almost against her will, in the twinings of the “damn stupid plant” called love.

The slaughterhouse is also important because it encapsulates what was happening in the deportation camps. (Müller’s mother was sent to a camp in the Soviet Union after World War II where she had to work for five years.) Taking the cue from Elizabeth Costello’s lecture, in the eponymous novel by J.M. Coetzee, on the philosophers and the animals, one might suggest that in the image of the slaughterhouse, Müller, like Costello, is drawing a parallel between the meat industry and the death fields sponsored by the communist regime. The workers who drink the warm blood of the cattle they have slaughtered are themselves the “herd” — deadened by habit to accept brutality as a matter of course. “They all belonged in the dock, [Kurt] screamed, they had stopped being human a long time ago.” Having developed a taste for animal blood, it is but natural that they would lust after human blood too.

In this novel, Müller is, of course, struggling against Adorno’s thesis that after the Holocaust, or in her case, the communist dictatorship, there can be no art. In the Nobel lecture quoted above, Müller adds, “The subject of dictatorship is necessarily present, because nothing can ever again be a matter of course once we have been robbed of nearly all ability to take anything for granted…. Nothing makes sense anymore and everything is true.” The meaning of the novel is its form, consisting of short, abrupt paragraphs, broken sentences and the whirlpool of words. The very existence of the novel is a challenge thrown to the Securitate, whose human incarnation, Captain Pjele, would make people eat poems for the crime of having dared to recite them.

The folk song, whose text Kurt is forced to swallow, forms the epigraph to this book. Captain Pjele finds fault with the song (with its “chilly laughter”) because it belongs to “different times”. “The rule of the bourgeoisie and the landowning class is long gone. Today our people sing different songs.” The narrator’s grandmother, belonging to the bourgeois past, sings herself to death. One of her remarkable feats in her last few days, when she had run mad in the fields, had been to steal and eat almost all the Communion wafers from the sacristy of the local church, leaving two “half-eaten” ones for the priest. In The Land of Green Plums, the god of religion offers no protection from the maw of the dictator. He is associated with the Mother — long-suffering, ineffectual, a bit of a fool, but at least offering the solace of humour to offset the grimness of the regime.

The narrator’s mother, significantly, is a survivor. She resents her daughter’s migration to the city, and writes letters “full of [her] illnesses” to blackmail the prodigal child back. After her husband’s death, she is left alone in the country with the half-insane grandmother. But she manages to carry on, even subverting the ubiquitous secret police in a subtle way when she is detained in the police station for questioning and utilizes her time dusting the office with a rag. When she is forced to migrate to Germany from Romania, she rearranges her life without fuss, marked by the cutting of her long braids: “You have a hard time if you arrive in Germany with a braid, she said.” Unlike her daughter, who feels trapped in her hatred, and unlike the daughter’s friends, who are unable to change themselves even if they let the barber cut their hair “as short as a dog’s pelt”, she is able to adjust, and so defeat the dictator’s designs in a way.

The daughter, lugging the burden of knowledge, is denied her mother’s native resourcefulness. Having witnessed her friends’ dissolution in the hands of the regime, she must keep her anger afresh, and pour it painstakingly into words to let the world know. Once Kurt and Georg give up the fight, the narrator, who seems to be a shadow of the writer, begins to record her experience in order to survive the survival, as it were. “Between my head and the pillow, I heard the dry objects of the mad people rustling: the withered bouquet of the waiting man, the grass pigtail of the dwarf lady, the newspaper hat of the old sled woman, the philosopher’s white beard.”

In The Land of Green Plums, the recurring images of the “sheep with red shanks”, the barber with the scissors, or the omnipresent Captain Pjele with his wolfhound of the same name, create a sense of lurking threat, which, however, is never spelt out. As a result, it is easy to feel tossed about in the sea of images without getting a grasp on their immediate, rather than the existential, significance. Since most of us, excepting the well-informed few, would have little idea of the horrors faced by Germans in Romania under Ceausescu, it would be instructive to look up Müller’s interview, “Securitate in all but name”, in http://www.signandsight.com/ where she talks of her trials in more prosaic terms. Juxtaposing the actual events with their mythologized counterparts in the novel, one begins to fully appreciate the Nobel committee’s decision to award the prize to Müller for having depicted the “the landscape of the dispossessed” with the “concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose”.