December 18, 2009
Herta Muller's The Passport is a relentlessly bleak, starkly realistic, and poetically searing novel about life in a small village under the strangling reign of Ceausescu. There is nothing light or airy in this book. Nighttime suffocates, daytime is drudgery, and even dreams, both sleeping and awake, hang heavy and dark on the dreamers.
The village miller, his wife, and his daughter -- and all the other villagers -- are anchored without hope of escape to their grim present. They cannot forget the even-more grim past shadowing their lives, nor do they have hope for the sure-to-be grim future that awaits them. Even if a passport allowing emigration to Western Europe can obtained, the price to pay for such a document in such a place is too heavy a toll to allow any kind of relief from the boding, abiding despair that has become like blood, pumping implacably through their veins.
There are many beautiful (albeit painful) passages in this short novel but the one that will stay with me always is one which recounts the hunger Katharina, the miller's wife, felt during the war. Her stomach is "a hedgehog." When food can be found or bartered for, whether it be grass soup (found) or potatoes (her body the trade), the hedgehog of hunger can be appeased, "its spines pulled in" for a time until hunger comes back again. Then its spines will again extend, the pain will come, and the bartering of body for food must start all over. The imagery of the hedgehog spines, retracting and then exerting outward again, was so powerful, yet also subtle. Therein lies Muller's gift: her writing is quietly and yet viscerally potent, inescapable, and unforgettable. Muller won the Nobel Prize for literature this year and The Passport offers ample proof why.
The Passport will not be a book read for pleasure, comfort, or escape. It is a book read to allow a necessary understanding of life under a Totalitarian regime. Totalitarianism kills all hope because it takes away all personal freedoms, and destroys the necessary ancillary to hope and dreams, which is choice. Without choice, a person is like a piece of cattle, shuffled and pushed around until the day of final slaughter. The only choice these characters have is to end their lives early or to plow forward, broken and bent. With writing that will transform the way you look at hunger, desire, fear, sublimation, and denial forever, The Passport is a book that, once read, that will never be forgotten.
Per FTC rules, the book reviewed here was a review copy supplied by the publisher.
|
|
