Title: The Appointment
Author: Herta Müller
Publisher: Picador
Publication Date: September 7, 2002
Paperback: 224 pages
ISBN: 978-0312420543
Genre: Literary Fiction
WINNER OF THE 2009 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
From the winner of the IMPAC Award, a fierce novel about a young Romanian woman’s discovery of betrayal in the most intimate reaches of her life
“I’ve been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp.” Thus begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceaucescu’s totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before; this time, she believes, will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men’s suits bound for Italy. “Marry me,” the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country.
As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot trying to flee to Hungary, to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them, to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers, and to Paul, her lover, her one source of trust, despite his constant drunkenness. In her distraction, she misses her stop to find herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the appointment pale by comparison.
Herta Müller pitilessly renders the humiliating terrors of a crushing regime. Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment confirms her standing as one of Europe’s greatest writers.
My Review:
The Appointment by Herta Müller is an absolute masterpiece of literature. The narrator is on a tram, once again heading to face another interrogation by Ceausescu’s secret police, and while she heads to this appointment she recounts various moments in her life, allowing the reader an inside look into another world, one that is difficult to imagine, yet Müller’s descriptions are spot on. With breath-taking beauty, Müller details with precision the simple, the mundane, the everyday scenes of life to show the reader a world of deprivation and a certain acceptance to maintain sanity in a society filled with black marketers, long lines for drink and food, plenty of one yet not the other, government owned shops, and the utter helplessness brought onto the people under such a regime. Müller’s writings brought back to me the sights, sounds and smells of the Former Soviet Union, the grays and blacks, the oneness and lack of free will. While The Appointment does not take place in the former USSR, rather Romania, it was not difficult for me to envision. I fear I have not done justice to this literary masterpiece. I would recommend The Appointment to anyone who would like a look into another culture and what it is like to live without the freedoms so many of us take for granted. As for myself, I plan to read a non-translated version to see what, if anything was lost.
Born in Romania in 1953, Herta Müller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceausescu’s Secret Police. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin. The recipient of the European Literature Prize, she has also won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for her previous novel, The Land of Green Plums.
I received a complimentary copy of The Appointment by Herta Müller from Henry Holt and Company Publishers to review. Receiving a copy in no way reflected my review of aforementioned novel.
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