A review by foggy_rosamund
The Land of Green Plums by Herta Müller

3.0

Set in Romania during Ceaușescu's regime, The Land of Green Plums focuses on a group of students who find they can no longer bear to live in a society rife with hypocrisy, casual cruelty and eventually torture. Müller's style is dream-like: it can be hard to know what moments are metaphorical (the endless eating of green plums? the mulberry trees carried on trains?) and what is actually taking place. I struggled to follow some sequences of events, but I think this may be a deliberate narrative choice. Müller writes with great energy, and part of the confusion of the text reflects the confusion of the narrator, who never knows if she can trust the people around her, or if she can believe what she sees. The narrative mixes personal loss, such as a grandmother succumbing to dementia, with the destruction of society, such as political murders, very effectively. We witness how profound personal loss does not diminish the pain of living under a totalitarian regime, and vice versa. The narrator fears she will loose her mind, and the readers fears for her too: how can she face what is happening around her? This is a compelling book, and very effective, but felt incomplete to me. At times, scenes seemed barely sketched out, and characters seemed archetypal rather than actual.