Books Reviews
~ Cont. ~
The Land of Green Plums (1993) by Herta Müller, trans. Michael Hofmann (1998)
Author Herta Müller (b. 1953) is a Romanian of German descent who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. Her novel The Land of Green Plums (1993) follows the vulnerable lives of a group of young Romanians to reveal the menace and mistrust manifested under the communist dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu (r. 1965-1989): “...in this country, we had to walk, eat, sleep, and love in fear...” (p. 2)
The opening scenes effectively convey the amorality, privileges of authority, and deadly hazard of deviance from the oppressive conformity of the regime. Lola, a college student from a poor district, has sex with anonymous men she meets on the tram as well as with the college gym teacher, who reports her after she follows him home. Lola is soon found dead in her dorm room, hanging by a belt of a roommate, the unnamed narrator.
Lola’s photo is swiftly posted at the dormitory entrance with a statement condemning her crime (suicide), which “brought disgrace upon the whole country.” (p. 23) At a formal ceremony, Lola is called a deceiver and “ex-matriculated from the university” as hundreds applaud. A vote is taken by a show of hands to expel her from the Communist Party. The gym teacher raises his hand first, followed by the rest. They kept their hands raised until they were tired, fearing to lower them until the gym teacher said the vote was unanimous. (p. 28)
The narrator and her friends Edgar, Kurt, and Georg doubt Lola’s death was suicide. The narrator had found Lola’s notebook and gives it to the young men who hide notebooks and other restricted books in a summer house. Edgar and Georg’s poems and Kurt’s photos of prison bases were also hidden there. In doing so, “[t]hey had exchanged fear for insanity.” (p. 41)
Many Romanians wanted to go to East Germany, where blue jeans and other products were more readily available. “Everyone lived by thinking of flight.” (p. 47) Edgar says the secret police spread rumors of the leader’s illness to catch those fleeing or planning to. At first, the four young people don’t want to leave Romania. But when they undergo interrogation, being followed, and searches of their and their parents’ residences, they begin planning to escape separately.
The group meets daily, laughing to hide their fear. “But fear always finds an out. If you control your face, it slips into your voice. If you manage to keep a grip on your face and your voice ... it will slip out through your fingers. It will pass through your skin and lie there. You can see it lying around on objects close by.” (pp. 74-75) Soon separated by different jobs, they cautiously communicate through coded letters and phone calls.
While working at a factory, the narrator develops a friendship with Tereza, whose refusal to join the Communist Party is allowed for a while because her father is a factory official. Worried the summer house will be searched, the narrator puts its secret cache in Tereza’s office. “Tereza took the parcel on trust, and I didn’t trust her.” (p. 114) Their friendship’s fragile foundation is indicative of the uncertainty of relationships engendered by the repressive regime. As the narrator realizes, “My distrust caused everything close to me to slide away.” (p. 131)
A sub-theme of the novel is the narrator’s troubled relationship with her family, which includes a senile grandmother who wanders into the fields at night. Rich in symbolism and excellently translated by Michael Hofmann, The Land of Green Plums is a powerful indictment of the criminality of Ceauşescu’s reign.
During World War Two, Herta Müller’s father had served in the Nazi army and later her mother, along with other Romanian Germans, spent five years of forced labor in the Soviet Union. Those examples instilled in young Herta Müller a recognition of the corrupting influence of ideology on individuals. While working as a translator at a factory, she befriended other writers opposed to the Ceauşescu dictatorship.
Müller lost her job in 1979 when she refused to spy for the secret police on workers and foreign visitors. The censored version of her first book, Nadirs, was published in 1982 in Romania and an uncensored version in Germany in 1984, which gained her recognition as a talented writer. Her criticism in the German press of the communist regime in Romania resulted in a publishing ban, interrogations, slanderous rumors, and death threats. She and her husband, writer Richard Wagner, emigrated to Germany in 1987. Her other works include Traveling on One Leg, The Appointment, The Hunger Angel, and The Passport. For more information, see her Nobel Prize biography.
Finger Bone (2014) by Hiroki Takahashi, trans. Takami Nieda (2023)
Set during World War Two, Finger Bone, is a fascinating novella about a Japanese soldier injured and sent to a field hospital in the mountains of Papua New Guinea. The title refers to the practice of medics cutting off a finger of the deceased, burning the flesh, and returning the bone to the soldier’s family in Japan. The unnamed narrator carries a finger bone of his schoolmate killed by “friendly fire” moments before his own injury. “His death nearly broke me.” (p. 44)
At the hospital, the narrator befriends Sanada, a 21-year-old private whose face is bandaged and Shimizu, an artist who lost his dominant left hand from grenade shrapnel but learned to draw with his right hand. His beautiful landscapes and camp scenes will decorate the hospital walls. The narrator and Sanada find a Kanaka village, where Sanaka agrees to teach the natives Japanese in return for shells to buy mangoes. He speculates that the Kanakas will use the Japanese language as tour guides after the war when Japan controls the island.
That assumption reflects the confidence held by the Japanese soldiers, reinforced by unsubstantiated rumors and misinformation. Ichimura, who oversees the POWs, is confident Japan will win because Americans are afraid of suicide. He compares a typical American soldier to “[a] tourist on a camping trip with his buddies.” (p. 38) The narrator and his fellow soldiers hear rumors of Japan’s conquest of Guadalcanal, the Imperial Navy’s “stunning victory” at Midway, air raids “over Oregon, and that the rest of the US mainland was being razed … by firebombs…” (p. 72)
Meanwhile, there are daily deaths of patients, many of them from malaria because the hospital ran out of medicine for it. “The empty beds grew conspicuous ... the sick and wounded had stopped arriving.” (p. 21) The narrator often woke in the middle of the night. “My nerves were always on alert ...” Once awake, if he couldn’t fall asleep again, he would sit on a tree stump and look at the stars, which “were exceptionally beautiful after the rain.” (p. 61)
One morning, emaciated Japanese soldiers arrive at the hospital with news that the Allies controlled the entire eastern coast. The hospital is evacuated of those able to walk and grenades for potential suicide are issued to all. The long march from the hospital is described in stark and powerful terms of the desperation, disorientation, despair, and death. “This too is war.” (p. 115)
The conclusion is foreshadowed at the beginning of the narrative:
I gazed at the husks of men shambling past. Hunched forward as if weighed down by a heavy burden, they dragged one foot, then the other, slowly across the yellow dirt, towing long shadows behind them. One shadow receded toward a pair of ankles, its owner listing forward. A thud. The human stirred no more. As the sun traced an arc across the sky, his shadow ticked around him like a sundial. (p. 7)
Finger Bone earned author Hiroki Takahashi the Shincho Prize for New Writers in 2014. The book is excellently translated into English (2023) by Takami Nieda, an award-winning translator and professor at Seattle Central College. In 2018, Hiroki Takahashi won the Akutagawa Prize for his novel Ceremonial Fire. I look forward to his other work being translated into English.
Closely Observed Trains (1965) by Bohumil Hrabal, trans. Edith Pargeter (1968)
The novella Closely Observed Trains (1965) by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal is set mainly in a Bohemian railway station as World War Two is ending in Europe in the spring of 1945. The station is small but important as a transport nexus for German troops and war matériel to and from the shifting Eastern front. Although ultimately a story of sacrificial heroism, humor softens the tragic trajectory.
The main character is Milǒs Hrma, a naïve 22-year- old railroad traffic controller, whose job it is to raise and lower the signals for trains. His family has a reputation for laziness based on the great-grandfather, a drummer boy wounded in 1848, who thereafter lived off a war pension. His gloating about it often provoked beatings, one of which caused his death in 1935.
Milǒs’s grandfather had been a circus hypnotist, which townspeople saw as “an ambitious bid to stroll his way through life as idly as possible.” (p. 11) When German troops passed through the town in 1939, the grandfather was the only one to confront them. But his attempt to hypnotize them was thwarted by a tank rolling over him. Milǒs’s father was a retired locomotive driver who collected rubbish and odd parts from dumps, resulting in their place looking like a scrapyard.
In flashbacks, we learn that Milǒs fell in love with a young woman, Masha, while they were painting opposite sides of a fence. Later, his anxiety prevents him from fulfilling the act of lovemaking and his subsequent humiliation leads him to slash his wrists. The unsuccessful suicide attempt is seen by townspeople as an attempt to avoid work.
Among the book’s cast of colorful characters is stationmaster Lánský, a pigeon-breeder whose opulent office “left you with the feeling that it ought to be carried around on a palanquin, complete with the station-master in it ...” (p. 20)
Seeing his current situation as “casting my pearls before swine” he anticipates promotion to inspector. (p. 24)
The funniest part of the book is the scandal of lecherous dispatcher Hubička who imprinted telegrapher Virginia Svatá’s derriere with station stamps and photographed the result. The stationmaster, a member of the Society for Public Regeneration, is horrified and an official investigation ensues after Virginia’s mother reports the incident. When the traffic chief Slušný arrives, Lánský hurries back to his office, covered with pigeon droppings and “above whose face a feather … fluttered like a white question mark.” (p. 52)
Yet, for all the humor, the suffering caused by the war manifests through several vignettes: a neighbor who has lost her mind after four years of German imprisonment; dying animals transported from the front to the slaughterhouse; a medical train of wounded soldiers in agony; evacuees from Dresden arriving in their pajamas.
The story culminates in an attempt to blow up an ammunition train between stations, thus avoiding collateral damage. Devised by Hubička in collaboration with a German resistance agent, Victoria Freie, it is to be carried out by Milǒs. Before Milǒs leaves on the mission, Victoria awakens his manhood in another comic scene penultimate to the dramatic ending.
Author Bohumil Hrabal (1914-1997) was born in Brno, Moravia, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, later living in Prague. During World War II, he worked as a railroad dispatcher. He received a law degree in 1946 but never practiced law; instead, working in a serious of jobs, including stagehand, notary clerk, postal worker, insurance agent, and traveling salesman.
In 1962, Hrabal became a full-time writer, but Communist censorship meant that he often published underground or abroad. Closely Watched Trains [an alternative English title for this novella] was filmed by Czech New Wave director Jiří Menzel. It won the 1967 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and gained Hrabal international attention. Other major works include Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (1964), I Served the King of England (1973), and Too Loud a Solitude (1977).