Abstract
The German-Romanian author Herta Müller was long something of an insider tip outside Germany, or indeed German Studies. The Dublin IMPAC award in 1998 for her novel The Land of Green Plums (1996) bought her to wider attention. This was cemented by the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009, which nonplussed the Anglophone literary world, and came as a surprise even to those familiar with the quality of her work. This volume is then genuinely timely in presenting the first overview of an important international author to an English-speaking audience since the Nobel award.
The volume contains an introduction and 13 chapters plus a substantial bibliography, which in itself will be a resource for researchers. Cumulatively the chapters cover all of Müller’s major works and their contextual framework: poetics, politics, gender, the Romanian background, the role of the Securitate, life-writing, translation, reception and the effect of the Nobel award. The reader can thus use the volume as an introduction to the writer herself, but also consult individual chapters on aspects of her work, or broader concerns in contemporary German culture, or indeed individual texts. It is well structured. The first three chapters offer a broad approach to Müller, offering insights into language, the Romanian context, and the toxic presence of the Securitiate in Müller’s work. Six chapters then present close readings of the major works and her collages from a variety of complementary angles. Finally four chapters address the international reception of Müller and her work, including an insightful piece by Rebecca Braun examining the role of the Nobel Prize in the way Müller is marketed and read today.
The choice of contributors is entirely convincing. The editors themselves are experts on the author and are well placed to assemble a ‘Who’s who’ of Müller criticism and a wide range of critical perspectives. It is also useful that there are contributors from a range of countries, including the UK, Germany, Holland and the USA, though it is perhaps curious, given the reiterated comments about the difference between Müller’s reception in the East and the West that there is not a more prominent contingent from Romania or the former Eastern bloc. The standard of contributions always varies in such edited volumes but the experience of the contributors here ensures that the standard is generally very high indeed. Stand-out chapters are those by Moray McGowan (a very illuminating reading of Reisende auf einem Bein, 2010); Norbert Otto Eke (subtle on the politics of the aesthetic in the Romanian novels); Brigid Haines’ own chapter (the first in-depth analysis of the remarkable 2009 gulag novel based on Oskar Pastior’s memoirs, Atemschaukel); Karin Bauer’s gruelling reading of gender as commodity exchange; and Lyn Marven’s analysis of the complexities of the relationship between fiction and autobiography. There are individual formulations too (e.g. Eke’s ‘logic of anxiety’ or ‘beautiful allegories of hopelessness’), which will doubtless be widely cited in subsequent literature. Personally, I got a good deal from the chapters outlining the Romanian context, something that will perhaps be most unfamiliar to readers of Müller. But the final section charting Müller’s reception in the English-language and global context, along with broader reflections about her fiction and its relation to biography, present a fascinating further perspective. And here Jean Boase-Beier’s analysis of the translation of Müller is brilliantly illuminating of her extraordinary and unmistakable style.
Overall, then, the volume is a must for all students of Müller, as well as researchers, and is pitched in such a way that general readers will gain much too. It offers a good deal of close reading and textual background but also places Müller in an illuminating theoretical context (especially as regards gender, migration, life-writing and trauma). Haines’ use of the difference between ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ memory was especially persuasive in teasing out approaches to this most traumatic and contested history of the twentieth century. Running through the volume also is a concern for placing Müller’s aesthetics, which will provide a stepping-stone for future works, especially the relation to ‘the postmodern’ (adduced straightforwardly by some contributors and rejected absolutely by others).
The writing in the volume is fluent and clear without losing academic crispness. Accessibility is increased by a deft and very sparing use of footnotes which makes for an admirably clean presentation and well-paced reading experience. Throughout the editors have also done an excellent job in introducing cross-references, which increase the integration of the volume and make it much more than the sum of its parts. It boasts an admirable cohesiveness and the addition of an index, bibliography and an introduction mean that it is hard to wish for a better or more highly contextualized introduction to the writer.