A Month of Novellas, Book 5: The Passport - Herta Muller (1986)

window in baby's bedroom

Wow.

This was definitely an intense book.
This felt like a large novel somehow condensed into a small volume.

There were so many stories, so much going on, particularly in comparison with some of the other short works I've been reading.

As can be plainly seen by this picture over her to the right of your screen, this novella is by Herta Muller, a Romanian born, German speaking Nobel Laureate. I've actually started reading another work by her not so long ago but never quite seemed to finish.

She's not an easy author to get into. It took me much longer to finish this 85 page novel than I thought it would. Part of the problem was that there was just so much information in each page, so much going on. But the other issue was the writing style.

The whole thing was written very staccato like, i.e. He did this. He did that. He did the other thing.
I found this style very tiring, both visually and physically. I yearned for a complex sentence that was longer than one line. Occasionally there would be a longer sentence, but so many of them followed this pattern, that I just became worn out.

The basic story is that a family of 3, with an adult daughter, would like to emigrate from Romania to Germany, since they're ethnically German. But in order to arrange for their passport they seem to have to endure Herculean tasks which become almost Sisyphian in the end. Bring flour, have daughter sleep with priest, that sort of thing.

All along though we're often treated to some beautiful imagery:
"Widow Kroner's face shone. People said: "Something is blooming in Widow Kroner's face." Her face was young. Its youthfulness was weakness. As one grows young before dying, so was her face. As one grows younger and younger, until the body breaks. Beyond birth." pp.37

Then again at times, I wondered if there had been a mistranslation.
"With naked eyes and with the stone in his ribs, Windisch says loudly: "A man is nothing but a pheasant in the world."" pp.70

Is the author having the protagonist say that all we are is food to be devoured? Pheasants are pretty expensive eating where I come from, so this at least twice repeated sentence's meaning was lost to me.

Muller does have a gift for setting a mood and I desperately wanted to get away from this village and these people and their totalitarian everyday life. It was all so grim and horrid and gray - at least that's how I pictured it - that I too wanted to emigrate with half the village and leave that dreadful place.

I don't think I'll so quickly forget this place, no matter how much I'd like to.