The Passport

by Herta Müller, Martin Chalmers (Translator)

Overview

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2009

'Just as the father in the house in which we live is our father, so Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu is the father of our country. And just as the mother in the house in which we live is our mother, so Comrade Elena Ceausescu is the mother of our country. Comrade Nicolae Ceausescu is the father of our children. All the children love comrade Nicolae and comrade Elena, because they are their parents.'

The Passport is a beautiful, haunting novel whose subject is a German village in Romania caught between the stifling hopelessness of Ceausescu's dictatorship and the glittering temptations of the West. Stories from the past are woven together with the problems Windisch, the village miller, faces after he applies for permission to migrate to West Germany.

Herta Müller describes with poetic attention the dreams and superstitions, conflicts and oppression of a forgotten region, the Banat, in the Danube Plain. In sparse, lyrical language, Herta Müller captures the forlorn plight of a trapped people.

This edition is translated by Martin Chalmers, with a new foreword by Paul Bailey.

Also by Herta Müller: Nadirs, The Land of Green Plums, The Appointment, and The Hunger Angel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781782832652
Publisher:	Profile
Publication date:	12/03/2015
Series:	Serpent's Tail Classics
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	698 KB

About the Author

Herta Müller was born in Timis, Romania in 1953. A vocal member of the German minority, she was forced to leave the country in 1987, and moved to Berlin, where she still lives. In 2009 she won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Herta Muller was born in Timis, Romania in 1953. A vocal memeber of the German minority, she was forced to leave the country in 1987. In that year, she went to west Berlin where she now lives. She was recently awarded the prestigious Ricarda-Huch Prize. Her books have been translated into all European languages - this edition of The Passport is the first publication of Herta Muller in English.
Martin Chalmers is a writer, editor and translator. He has translated novels and short story collections by Erich Fried, Ernst Weiss, Herta Muller, Hubert Fichte, and Bertolt Brecht.

Editorial Reviews

This English-language debut by a Romanian-born West Berliner is remarkable for its stylistic purity. Muller's angry tale of an ethnic German anxious to emigrate from his stultifying Romanian village is relayed in deceptively straightforward sentences (``Katharina had sold her winter coat for ten slices of bread. Her stomach was a hedgehog. Every day Katharina picked a bunch of grass. The grass soup was warm and good'') that pile up in striking patterns (later, ``the second snow came. . . . The hedgehog stabbed''). Intently focused prose animates the parochial town with its corrupt power brokers, gamey folk songs and a tree reputed to have eaten its own apples, as well as the problematic relations among the central character, his embittered wife and their nubile daughter, who, like her mother before her during the war, is forced to grant sexual favors to men of privilege. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"With the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, Müller depicts the language of the dispossessed" -Jury of the Nobel Prize for Literature

"Appropriately on the side of underdogs from Ceausescu's dystopia to Ukrainian labour camps ... so opening the eyes of non-German readers to new worlds. And that, from Beowulf to Müller, is a noble as well as a Nobel function of literature" -The Times

"Especially now, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's a beautiful signal that such high quality literature and this life experience are being honoured" -Angela Merkel

"[Muller's] dark, closely observed and sometimes violent work often explores exile and the grim quotidian realities of life under Ceausescu... Her sensibility is often bleak, but the detail in her fiction can whip it alive" -New York Times

"Müller has an eye for the surreal detail of a police state and has made it into strong, muscular literature" -The Times


"With the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, Müller depicts the language of the dispossessed" -Jury of the Nobel Prize for Literature

"Appropriately on the side of underdogs from Ceausescu's dystopia to Ukrainian labour camps ... so opening the eyes of non-German readers to new worlds. And that, from Beowulf to Müller, is a noble as well as a Nobel function of literature" -The Times

"Especially now, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's a beautiful signal that such high quality literature and this life experience are being honoured" -Angela Merkel

"[Muller's] dark, closely observed and sometimes violent work often explores exile and the grim quotidian realities of life under Ceausescu... Her sensibility is often bleak, but the detail in her fiction can whip it alive" -New York Times

"Müller has an eye for the surreal detail of a police state and has made it into strong, muscular literature" -The Times

From the Publisher