Word: m
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Were there certain pairs of pop-culture twins that came to mind when you were writing this book? Someone in some review somewhere mentioned Diane Arbus' photo of those young twins, and that's an iconic image for me. I'm a huge admirer of Diane Arbus. And even though my twins don't look like that and they're older, there's something in the way those two girls look at the camera. With her work, there's always this quality of looking at people maybe you feel you shouldn't be looking...
...used to teach book arts in Chicago, and you actually make books. As someone, then, who is so involved with the physical construction of books, are you concerned that one day everything will be digital? I'm concerned about the effect of the digital on the world of the printed book. I think there are a lot of things that digital books could do more effectively. I can imagine, for example, that with textbooks and telephone books and all of those resources, it would be lovely for them to be searchable the way we're used to searching the Internet...
...past is any guide, the Nobel won't make Müller a household name in America - it certainly hasn't done much for Elfriede Jelinek (who won in 2004) or Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio (2008). That may simply be because there is little in the lives of most Americans that resonates with what Müller has gone through. Then again, for Müller, life under tyranny seems to be in part a figure for the existential terror of life anywhere. It is a world of secrecy and universal suspicion. Everyone suspects everyone of betrayal...
...just the experience of tyranny but in particular the woman's experience of tyranny that interests Müller. At the beginning of The Appointment a young Romanian woman who works in a factory is arrested by the secret police. The factory makes suits for export to Italy, and she has been caught slipping notes into the linings that say "Marry me," with her name and address...
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...