Much like her other well-known novel in the states The Appointment, Herta Muller’s The Land of Green Plums is a novel that can’t help but overly politicize itself. I understand the need for these books and their merit as works of protest or a newsreel of past state injustices, but a lot of the time those attributes, as admirable as they are, come at the expense of a good story. For example, The Appointment has a wonderful setup that is creepy, disturbing and suspenseful, but the story itself is never one of those three things throughout its length. The same goes for this novel, which is easily her most popular, garnering big name literary awards and quite possibly influencing the decision to award her the Nobel Prize in 2009. It’s the case for most of the books and writers who fall in that category, and I question whether they will have lasting power. This book deals with five friends, all German immigrants to Romania, who move from the rural countryside to the city to go to college, and in doing so they replace one kind of oppression (the discrimination they face as a German minority) for another kind under the totalitarian rule of the Communist dictatorship. Muller is able to characterize the horror’s well, with things like sex and friendship being nothing but commodities to be bought, sold and finally betrayed among the five individuals, which lead more than a few of them to ruin. But they are interchangeable, even the unnamed narrator who is a little too much of an observer, a cursory victim to everything that happens to the other four. It has a really strong final few pages, with the lasting image being that of Captain Pjele, the book’s monster and representative of the state, in a picture with a young boy, but overall these kinds of books tire me out, and it was not a very good improvement over the last book of hers I have read.
Rating: 3/5
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