Word: m
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...surprising choice to Americans too - only a few of Müller's books have been translated into English - but in a way it would have been a surprise if the choice had not been a surprise. In the past decade, about half of the Nobel laureates in literature have been writers of whom few readers in the U.S., academics and literary journalists included, had or have any real awareness. What Americans may not realize is that Müller's selection isn't much less surprising in Germany. Müller, whose major works include The Land of Green...
...Müller was born in 1953 in the village of Nitzkydorf, Romania. Europe's agonizing political history was already in her DNA: her father had served in the Waffen SS, the crack combat troops of the Nazi Party, and after the war her mother spent five years in a Soviet work camp. Müller was a member of Romania's German-speaking minority - almost no one in Nitzkydorf spoke anything else. This paradoxical sense that even in her homeland, she was in exile, would have a profound effect on her work...
...university Müller agitated for freedom of speech, a right 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...
...publication of Niederungen was much delayed, and when it finally appeared it was censored extensively, and Romanian critics dismissed it. But Müller managed to smuggle an uncensored copy to Germany, where the stories received rapturous praise. Müller moved to Germany in 1987 and has lived in Berlin with her husband ever since - like her mother before her, a political exile. (See a video with Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus...
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...