The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

by Herta Müller, Philip Boehm (Translator)

Overview

“VIVIDLY POETIC . . . MÜLLER HAS EXERCISED HER VOICE WITH A FURY THAT VIBRATES OFF THE PAGE.”—THE BOSTON GLOBE

Romania—the last months of the Ceausescu regime. Adina is a young schoolteacher. Paul is a musician. Clara works in a wire factory. Pavel is Clara’s lover. But one of them works for the secret police and is reporting on the others. One day Adina returns home to discover that her fox-fur rug has had its tail cut off. On another occasion, it’s the hind leg. Then a foreleg. The mutilated fur is a taunting sign that she is being watched by the secret police—the fox was ever the hunter. Images of photographic precision combine into a kaleidoscope of terror as Adina and her friends struggle to keep mind and body intact in a world pervaded by complicity and permeated by fear, where it’s hard to tell victim from perpetrator. Once again, Herta Müller uses language that displays “the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose”—as the Swedish academy noted upon awarding her the Nobel Prize—to create a hauntingly cinematic portrayal of the corruption of the soul under totalitarianism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250094612
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	05/02/2017
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

HERTA MÜLLER is the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the European Literature Prize. She is the author of, among other books, The Hunger Angel and The Land of Green Plums. Born in Romania in 1953, 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.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS


1. The way of the apple worm 1
2. The man inside his own hand 14
3. The forelock 18
4. As good as a piece of bread 38
6. A necktie 53
7. Summer entrails 57
8. Days of melons, days of pumpkins 61
9. The cat and the dwarf 68
10. Nuts 84
11. A different silence 94
12. Eardrum infection 103
13. The smallest man carries the biggest cane 111
14. The grass straw in the mouth 115
15. Face without face 118
16. The razor blade 129
17. A fox will step into a trap 132
18. You’re not saying anything 139
19. My head is dark 148
20. The fox on the table 158
21. The hand kiss 163
22. The lost shovel 168
23. I can’t stand looking at the water when it’s so cold out 172
24. There was a time and is no more 175
25. The birthmark 182
26. The wasp game 188
27. The spreading city 196
28. The chamber pot 205
29. The fingernails grow 211
30. Transparent sleep 217
31. A black and white sky 220
32. Frozen raspberries 226
33. I don’t know you 232
34. That doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter at all 236

Editorial Reviews

"A haunting portrayal."—The Washington Post

"Remarkable."—NPR

"Extraordinary . . . A profoundly unsettling novel."—The Times Literary Supplement (London)

"The Fox Was Ever the Hunter is a collage of images, stories and fragments of forbidden songs. . . . When the collage is completed, the reader understands that each and every one of Müller’s stories, every flight of luscious language and every brutal fact, has been necessary in depicting a society torn to pieces."—The New York Times

"Reads like poetry . . . The Fox Was Ever the Hunter is a short book, but the way Müller narrates gives it a luminescence, like wet stone seen at night. . . . Of the writers to survive life under the Communist bloc, Müller has written most poignantly about the way surveillance and state control at once necessitated and warped the fabric of love. . . . From the moment she left, Müller has exercised her voice with a fury that vibrates off the page nearly a quarter century later. In this vividly poetic novel, she reminds us what life without that freedom looked, felt, and tasted like."—Boston Globe

"A dark collage, which glints with fear—and with beauty . . . Müller’s prose—as poetic as it is blunt—works like a prism, shattering and illuminating a world that is always watching, waiting."—The Atlantic

"Perhaps no author has captured the surreal textures of Iron Curtain paranoia quite like Herta Müller."—Vogue.com (Best Books of the Month)

"This newly translated 1992 novel set during the twilight of Romania’s Ceaușescu regime makes vivid the persecution Müller and others suffered. . . . She uses the distinctive language honoured by the Nobel Committee for its ‘concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose’ to give a powerful sense of the toxic atmosphere of a totalitarian regime."—BBC Culture (UK)

"Atmospheric, lyrical . . . An essential work of post-Iron Curtain literature and a harrowing portrait of life under suspicion."—Kirkus Reviews (starred)

"Offers a bleak and poetic portrait of Romanian village life in the final days of the Ceaușescu regime, where deprivation is ubiquitous, cruelty is standard, and spying is a survival skill. . . . Thickly lyrical and sometimes downright hallucinatory . . . few descriptions of life under totalitarian rule are as beautifully evocative."—Booklist (starred)

From the Publisher

…a collage of images, stories and fragments of forbidden songs. Müller arranges them in such a way that the reader gets a sense of how terrifying and rife with betrayal life in Romania was during the end of Ceausescu's regime…The Fox Was Ever the Hunter [is]…often considered one of Müller's more "difficult" books. Indeed the first 50 pages are slow going, and some of the lighter-hearted anecdotes can at first seem tangential to the plot. But eventually, when the collage is completed, the reader understands that each and every one of Müller's stories, every flight of luscious language and every brutal fact, has been necessary in depicting a society torn to pieces and tasked, with the curtains finally open and the light streaming in, with putting those pieces back together to make sense of it all.

The New York Times Book Review - Vendela Vida

08/15/2016
Set in Romania at the end of the Ceausescu era, this Kafkaesque tale offers a glimpse of a society unhinged by fear and paranoia and crushed by the hopelessness of its dead-end future. Its principal characters include Clara, a worker in a wire-making factory; her lover, Pavel, a married lawyer; Paul, a musician whose concerts have been raided by the police; and Adina, a schoolteacher who discovers that someone is regularly entering her apartment and systematically—and symbolically—dismembering a fox rug in her bedroom. Suspicions suggest that someone in this circle of friends and acquaintances is giving information to the authorities—but who? Nobel Prize–winner Müller (The Hunger Angel) foregrounds her tale against a bleak landscape mired in pollution and industrial waste, where the natural world is menacing: poplar trees ringing the town are described as "knives," and the sun as a "blazing pumpkin." In short, staccato chapters etched with her spare but crystalline prose, she parades scores of nameless working-class people who seem devoid of any inner life and whose prospects for rising above their circumstances are summed up as "Nothing but this gutter of poverty, hopelessness, and tedium, from mother to child and on to that child's children." More than a portrait of individual lives under the suffocating weight of a dictatorship, Müller's novel is a searing appraisal of a people whose souls have been strangled by despair. (May)

Publishers Weekly

12/01/2015
This early work is more evidence why Müller won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. During Ceausescu's waning days, Adina works as a school teacher, and factory worker Clara and musician Pavel are lovers. Someone's an informant, as Adina realizes when she finds her fox fur rug mutilated; the fox, as hunter, is out to get her. After repeatedly refusing to cooperate with the secret police, Müller managed to leave Romania in 1987 and now lives in Berlin.

Library Journal

★ 2016-02-15
Atmospheric, lyrical novel from Nobel Prize-winning writer Müller (Traveling on One Leg, 1998, etc.) of life in Romania during the closing days of the Ceausescu dictatorship. Considered Müller's most difficult, this novel first appeared in 1992. The German original permits the rendering of the title as, "back then, the fox was the hunter." Now the fox is definitely the quarry. It takes a while to come to that point, however, for the first 100 or so pages of Müller's book are given over to densely rendered, poetic descriptions of people and places in a town along the Danube that sometimes have only peripherally to do with the main action; in that inventory, flies, ants, dogs, and poplars figure prominently. Adina, the central character, is a teacher, her boyfriend, Paul, a musician. They are not exactly activists, not exactly hard-core intellectuals, but even so, they're suspect enough that a fox fur that Adina has had since girlhood is steadily being whittled away, taunting evidence that while they're at work, the Securitate is visiting their apartment. Someone is always watching. Even Pavel, the paramour of Adina's friend Clara, isn't immune from being spied on as the two make love in an apparently deserted cornfield—and he's one of the spies: "Aren't you a lawyer," Clara asks him. "Yes, he says, but not at the courthouse." In this world, a mild joke about the dictator takes on the most serious contours. Adina's friendship with Clara frays over her choice of lovers, but even so, Clara warns Adina that the noose is tightening, giving her time to escape, as Müller herself did, to the West—though Adina worries that in trying to flee they'll wind up gunned down in a cornfield: "And every now and then, she said, a hair will get stuck in your teeth while you're eating, and it won't be one of the baker's that just happened to land in the dough." An essential work of post-Iron Curtain literature and a harrowing portrait of life under suspicion.

Kirkus Reviews