Herta Muller - Nobel Prize for Literature 2009

Greetings,

Herta Muller has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She left Romania in 1987 and now lives in Berlin.

Her work documents her personal experience living under the totalitarian dictatorship of Ceausescu. Remember 1984; thought police, 700,000 informers, corruption, secret police. People just disappear. Remember Kafka writing in Prague.

Muller lost her job as a translator at a tractor company for refusing secret police pressure on her to become an informant. The government never let her forget it.

She smuggled her first book to Germany with a diplomat's help. It found an editor, publisher and audience. She kept telling her story.

A woman in one of her stories works in a textile factory. She hides messages inside the seams of men's clothing to be exported to Italy. "Marry me," with her name and address.

Here is an English excerpt of "Everything I Own I Carry With Me." It is sad, strong, brilliant, poetic and harrowing. The narrator is a 17-year old on their way to a Russian work camp in the Ukraine. Muller's mother spent five years in a work camp.

..."After the five years in the camp, I strolled daily through the commotion of the streets, rehearsing in my head the best things to say, if arrested. CAUGHT RED-HANDED: against this guilty verdict I prepared a thousand excuses and alibis. I carry silent baggage. I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself in words. I just pack myself differently each time I speak."

Read more...

Remember.

Metta.