Word: ller
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...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...
...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...