For a language that bears such a close relation to English, German has been poorly served by translations. Compared to, for example, the ease with which French or Spanish has been rendered, translations of German have often seemed heavy and cumbersome, as if it was being translated into a language that looked and sounded like English, but never read like it. Fortunately, that situation is changing. Recent translations of Kafka and Thomas Mann have revitalised reputations of classics, and now translations like Michael Hofmann’s skilful version of Herta Müller’s novel promise to introduce the English reader to contemporary German fiction too.
The Land of Green Plums is, apparently, a largely autobiographical account of Müller’s own struggles with the paranoid regime of Ceausescu before she was allowed to emigrate in 1987. Originally published in 1993, 4 years after Ceausescu was executed, there is no hint of relief in its pages. Instead, it is an unflinching act of historical witness to the brutality, both physical and psychological, of the regime.
Narrated in brutally spare sentences, the novel covers the lives of four university students in a country where nobody is to be trusted. The state has infiltrated everywhere, and is completely in control of the media. It interprets events for the people. When the narrator’s room mate Lola commits suicide, it is soon announced that she was a traitor to the party, and the gathered students enthusiastically denounce the dead girl’s memory. Yet the official version of events is questioned by the narrator. She befriends Edgar, Kurt and Georg, and together they try to maintain some kind of intellectual freedom.
If that sounds like there’s very little plot, then that’s because there is. The odious Inspector Pjele occasionally interrogates them, and the students are all at one time or another followed by a man with a dog, but there are no great moments of drama. Instead, what Müller offers is a subtly shifting portrayal of the terrible procession of day after day where oppression squats on you and your thoughts seem subject to betrayal.
The authorities allow the students to complete their degrees, but then they all end up in odious jobs. Kurt’s job in particular provides a damning and horrifying picture of the grim side of life under the regime. He’s sent to work in the office of a slaughter house, where he soon realises that the men drink the blood of the animals they slaughter. Kurt is horrified by the sight and the realisation that the men go home and kiss their children, who in turn develop a taste for blood that will see them collude in the same practice. The pressure his fellow workers place on him to join them becomes an almost overpowering metaphor for the situation in Romania.
Kurt resists, but it soon becomes clear there will be no happy ending. The state will get the narrator and her friends whether they collude or not. Jobs can be lost as well as awarded. Beatings can be administered. Friends can be false. The choice between suicide and survival can grow increasingly complex.
Müller’s book is unremittingly horrifying, but the quality of the writing is so mesmerising that you cannot look away. Her recent Nobel victory may have come as a complete surprise to most people, but on this evidence, it’s fully justified.