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The land of green plums : a novel / Herta Müller ; translated by Michael Hofmann.

By: Contributor(s): Material type: TextTextLanguage: English Original language: German Publication details: New York : Picador, 2010.Edition: 1st Picador edDescription: 258 pages ; 21 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780312429942
  • 0312429940
Uniform titles:
  • Herztier. English
Subject(s): Genre/Form:
Partial contents:
Nobel lecture: Every word knows something of a vicious circle / Herta Müller ; translated by Philip Boehm (p. [243]-258).
Awards:
  • International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, 1998.
Summary: Five Romanian students under the Ceaușescu regime struggle to better their lives. Through the suicide of a mutual friend, the unnamed narrator meets a trio of young men with whom she shares a subjugated political and philosophic rebelliousness. The jobs the state assigns them after graduation pull each to a different quadrant of the country, and this, as well as the narrator's new friendship with the daughter of a prominent Party member, strains their relations. The group manages to maintain its closeness despite this, through coded letters.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library Fiction MÜLLER HERTA Available 33111010814941
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Set in Romania at the height of Ceauescu's reign of terror, The Land of Green Plums tells the story of a group of young people who leave the impoverished province for the city in search of better prospects and camaraderie. But their hopes are ravaged, because the city, no less than the countryside, bears everywhere the mark of the dictatorship's corrosive touch. All the narrator's friends--teachers and students of vaguely dissident allegiance--betray her, do away with themselves, or both. As they do so, we see the way the totalitarian state comes to inhabit every human realm and how everyone, even the strongest, must either bend to the oppressors or resist them and thereby perish.

Herta Müller, herself a survivor of Ceausescu's police state, speaks from intimate experience. Scene by scene, in language at once harsh and poetic, she constructs a devastating picture of a society and a generation ruined by fear. In simple images of hieroglyphic power--policeman filling their pockets and mouths with green plums; girls sleeping with abattoir workers for bags of offal; a docile proletariat making things no one wants--"tin sheep and wooden watermelons"--Müller anatomizes a country and its citizens and the corruption that has rotted the core of both.

Includes Herta Müller's Nobel lecture, delivered Dec. 7, 2009.

Nobel lecture: Every word knows something of a vicious circle / Herta Müller ; translated by Philip Boehm (p. [243]-258).

Five Romanian students under the Ceaușescu regime struggle to better their lives. Through the suicide of a mutual friend, the unnamed narrator meets a trio of young men with whom she shares a subjugated political and philosophic rebelliousness. The jobs the state assigns them after graduation pull each to a different quadrant of the country, and this, as well as the narrator's new friendship with the daughter of a prominent Party member, strains their relations. The group manages to maintain its closeness despite this, through coded letters.

International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, 1998.

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