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A review by jevajevajeva
The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller
2.0
Three nights in a row I was haunted by the same dream. Once again I was riding home through the clouds on a white pig. But this time when I looked down, the land had a different appearance, there was no sea along its edge. And no mountains in the middle, no Carpathians. Only flat land, and not a single village. Nothing but wild oats everywhere, already autumn-yellow.
Who switched my country, I asked.
The hunger angel looked at me from the sky and said: America.
Where did all the people go, I asked.
He said nothing.
-Herta Müller, The Hunger Angel. 2012.
When Herta Müller won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, she was being awarded for such novels as The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment—specifically, their use of the “concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose” as to “depict the landscape of the dispossessed.” Her newest novel certainly abides by her signature qualities…and yet, it falls far short of being another addition to her list of masterpieces.
Published in its original German as Atemschauke, and titled in Britain with its opening line, Everything I Possess I Carry With Me, Müller’s 2012 The Hunger Angel is the first novel she’s written since winning the Nobel Prize. However, calling Müller’s piece a “novel” is perhaps inaccurate. Rather, it is a 304-page prose poem following the fictional character of Leo Auberg and his deportation to a Soviet Union labor camp in the year of 1945. Müller had originally intended to co-write the novel with deportee and fellow Romanian poet Oskar Pastior, but when he died unexpectedly, she continued with the project on her own. The effort is now a result of meticulous interviews and the dreamlike rendering that only Müller can get away with.
However, unlike the painfully beautiful Land of Green Plums, The Hunger Angel does not deliver, as one would expect from a Nobel Laureate. Perhaps the biggest hindrance is that Müller does not offer context until the afterword. The reader must gather for themselves that Leo is a Romanian ethnic German who has been deported for the rebuilding of what is presumably Stalingrad, with few clues to use to reach such a conclusion.
Unfortunately for the history as well as the reader, most audiences are unaware of the German POW rebuilding of the USSR and, especially, of the deportation of Romanians for this project. Müller never allows a pause to explain this. While the prose poem can theoretically be read not just as a testament to the labor camps, but to camps of all sorts—concentration, detention, Gulag, internment— Müller is instead too specific and narrow in her illustration to allow for free exploration of this idea on the reader’s part. As a result, her dribbles of incomplete context leave the reader grasping, desperate and, ultimately, the worst thing a reader can be—frustrated.
Müller muddles her themes further with the introduction of unnecessary asides. For example, Leo begins his narration with an admittance of his sexual explorations—“I let myself be passed from one man to the next”—and weaves this into a segue by iterating that if he’d been caught in the yet-unmentioned labor camp, he’d have been put to death for being a homosexual. While it’s an important thought, it’s not particularly relevant to the whole of the story.
Rather, where Müller is at her strongest is in her lyricism; the prose is relentlessly striking, catching poetry in the horrendous. Translator Philip Boehm would have had his hands full moving the motion, rhythm and imagery of Müller’s flexible German into the stiffer confines of English. (A fun example: The German title, Atemschaukel, is a compound word that means something along the lines of "BreathingSwing" or "BreathSwinging,” and is used “to denote the mechanical and distanced aspects of self awareness of breathing that the prison experience engendered.“ The Hunger Angel doesn’t leave quite the same impact.) When in doubt, Boehm does like Müller does and invents the words. One or two are left in their original tongue, when needed.
And yet, The Hunger Angel is a weak effort. Müller practically glorifies the situation in the camp with her elevated prose, whereas in The Land of Green Plums the stream-of-conscious prose truly emphasized the “landscape of the dispossessed.” What’s more, the obscure trials of the deported Romanian-Germans requires a history lesson before or in the story, rather than as Müller’s endnote. When her writing is poetry, it soars; however, as a comprehensive story, The Hunger Angel is never able to lift off the ground.
Metropolitan Books, 304 pages. [RMS: 4.5]
Visit me at Quakeculture.wordpress.com for more
Who switched my country, I asked.
The hunger angel looked at me from the sky and said: America.
Where did all the people go, I asked.
He said nothing.
-Herta Müller, The Hunger Angel. 2012.
When Herta Müller won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, she was being awarded for such novels as The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment—specifically, their use of the “concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose” as to “depict the landscape of the dispossessed.” Her newest novel certainly abides by her signature qualities…and yet, it falls far short of being another addition to her list of masterpieces.
Published in its original German as Atemschauke, and titled in Britain with its opening line, Everything I Possess I Carry With Me, Müller’s 2012 The Hunger Angel is the first novel she’s written since winning the Nobel Prize. However, calling Müller’s piece a “novel” is perhaps inaccurate. Rather, it is a 304-page prose poem following the fictional character of Leo Auberg and his deportation to a Soviet Union labor camp in the year of 1945. Müller had originally intended to co-write the novel with deportee and fellow Romanian poet Oskar Pastior, but when he died unexpectedly, she continued with the project on her own. The effort is now a result of meticulous interviews and the dreamlike rendering that only Müller can get away with.
However, unlike the painfully beautiful Land of Green Plums, The Hunger Angel does not deliver, as one would expect from a Nobel Laureate. Perhaps the biggest hindrance is that Müller does not offer context until the afterword. The reader must gather for themselves that Leo is a Romanian ethnic German who has been deported for the rebuilding of what is presumably Stalingrad, with few clues to use to reach such a conclusion.
Unfortunately for the history as well as the reader, most audiences are unaware of the German POW rebuilding of the USSR and, especially, of the deportation of Romanians for this project. Müller never allows a pause to explain this. While the prose poem can theoretically be read not just as a testament to the labor camps, but to camps of all sorts—concentration, detention, Gulag, internment— Müller is instead too specific and narrow in her illustration to allow for free exploration of this idea on the reader’s part. As a result, her dribbles of incomplete context leave the reader grasping, desperate and, ultimately, the worst thing a reader can be—frustrated.
Müller muddles her themes further with the introduction of unnecessary asides. For example, Leo begins his narration with an admittance of his sexual explorations—“I let myself be passed from one man to the next”—and weaves this into a segue by iterating that if he’d been caught in the yet-unmentioned labor camp, he’d have been put to death for being a homosexual. While it’s an important thought, it’s not particularly relevant to the whole of the story.
Rather, where Müller is at her strongest is in her lyricism; the prose is relentlessly striking, catching poetry in the horrendous. Translator Philip Boehm would have had his hands full moving the motion, rhythm and imagery of Müller’s flexible German into the stiffer confines of English. (A fun example: The German title, Atemschaukel, is a compound word that means something along the lines of "BreathingSwing" or "BreathSwinging,” and is used “to denote the mechanical and distanced aspects of self awareness of breathing that the prison experience engendered.“ The Hunger Angel doesn’t leave quite the same impact.) When in doubt, Boehm does like Müller does and invents the words. One or two are left in their original tongue, when needed.
And yet, The Hunger Angel is a weak effort. Müller practically glorifies the situation in the camp with her elevated prose, whereas in The Land of Green Plums the stream-of-conscious prose truly emphasized the “landscape of the dispossessed.” What’s more, the obscure trials of the deported Romanian-Germans requires a history lesson before or in the story, rather than as Müller’s endnote. When her writing is poetry, it soars; however, as a comprehensive story, The Hunger Angel is never able to lift off the ground.
Metropolitan Books, 304 pages. [RMS: 4.5]
Visit me at Quakeculture.wordpress.com for more