Word: fiction
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...outside most moviegoers' experience. What Peli is interested in is dread, a feeling everyone is familiar with. (Will I lose my job? Has she found someone else? Why hasn't our kid come home yet? What's that strange rash?) Movies take that anxiety, crystallize it and, because fiction demands an ending, resolve it. The threat is provided, the fear made flesh, the monster confronted. All gone - feel better? Horror movies provide vicarious psychotherapy in an hour and a half. PA is different. At the end, it doesn't let viewers off the hook. It leaves them hanging and dares...
...Such a scenario is, of course, the stuff of an anti-Berlusconi filmmaker's vivid imagination. But reality may be inching toward fiction. The Italian Constitutional Court's decision late Wednesday to overturn an immunity-from-prosecution law risks setting off a high-stakes showdown between the 73-year-old Prime Minister and an array of antagonists, real and imagined. (See Silvio Berlusconi's worst gaffes...
...increasingly difficult to come by under Nicolae Ceauşescu's dictatorship, especially for German-speaking Romanians. After graduation she became a translator at a factory, but she ran afoul of the secret police when she refused to serve as an informant and lost her job. She began writing fiction, and in 1982 she published a collection of stories called Niederungen, rendered in English as Nadirs. In spare, poetic, forceful language the stories describe cruelty and repression in a German-speaking village much like the one Müller grew...
Since then Müller has published more than 20 books, both fiction and poetry. She revisits persistently, almost obsessively, her earlier life in Romania and her experience of political oppression. The Land of Green Plums describes the fate of a young woman from the country who attends a Romanian university. Over the course of the novel - it's narrated by one of her roommates - Lola is politically harassed and sexually traumatized, and finally she hangs herself. The title refers to the unripe plums that the city's ogreish police officers steal and eat as they roam the streets...
Reviews of Müller's fiction in America have been largely positive, though there has been some reluctance to embrace her almost relentlessly bleak totalitarian cityscapes. Müller herself has dismissed suggestions that she focuses too narrowly on a single subject. "The most overwhelming experience for me was living under the dictatorial regime in Romania," Müller has told the press. "And simply living in Germany, hundreds of kilometers away, does not erase my past experience. I packed up my past when I left, and remember that dictatorships are still a current topic in Germany." (Read "French...