Further Thoughts on Herta Müller's "Herztier"

My last post to this blog was about Herta Müller's Herztier (published here as "The Land of Green Plums"), and her collection of short stories Nadirs.  Since my discussion with my friends at the Trinity Book Club, and also doing a bit more reading and research, I've decided to amend my comments.  On the frontispiece of the book, the author share's this poem by Gellu Naum:

Jeder hatte einen Freund in jedem Stükchen Wolke
so ist das halt mit Freunden so die Welf voll Schrecken ist
auch meine Mutter sagte das ist ganz normal
Freunde dommen nicht in Frage
denk an seriöse Dinge.

Everyone had a friend in every wisp of cloud 

so is it just with friends when the world is full of terror

just as my mother says that this is completely normal

Friends are not a part of the question

Think rather on serious things.

That Ms. Müller should quote this poem at the outset of her novel, gives the reader some serious insight as to how to tackle the dark, dense, poetic prose of the author.  Naum was the founder of a surrealist group in Bucharest, until suppressed by the regime, then later released to write in 1968.  Making ones way through the forest of characters and events that Ms. Müller sets up, one realizes that the characters (the Narrator, Georg, Kirk, and Edgar) are really not the characters.  The supreme character is life itself, manifested in the details about the father, the mother, the man waiting with the wilted flowers, the dwarf woman, and the party stooge, among others.  Each offers a clue about the survival skills necessary in life, be it the singing grandmother, or the praying grandmother.  The author, however - if indeed this is auto-biographical - averts her gaze endeavoring not to look into the eyes of either.  Not to know, not to have friends, is the survival technique, as the poem so clearly warns.  

In Nadirs, Herta Müller describes a beautiful bouquet as a dense thicket of plant life, and this is how I viewed both the short stories and the novel.  There is a depth of detail and description, but there is not a depth of knowing.  The reader is clearly awash in sights, sounds, smells, emotions, and aversions.  The prose is so simple, almost block-like, some of which may be due to its Swabian influence, that the reader is transported to a simpler time, a more naïve time.  I kept feeling that the life and lives that were being portrayed were from a medieval time.  I felt that so completely that when the name "Adenauer" was mentioned it was a shock.

After our book club discussion I realized that as Americans, we may think that we understand the European mind-set.  That itself is a fiction in that there are several European mindsets.  It becomes difficult for those of us fed the American Dream to understand the dream or the nightmare of other cultures.  Modern life in a city deludes the village personalities that still try to cope with the present situation.  I am reminded of the film Good Bye Lenin in which an East German woman, in a coma, wakes up after the wall is down.  Her family goes to great effort to recreate the past and ease her into the present.  Life in Herta Müller's Herztier, is not so gentle, gracious, or humorous.  The denial and delusion are meant to enable all to live and to survive a system that betrays, lies, and denudes.  

As I read this book, I was reminded of a news segment on NPR where the reporter went in search of Romanian Culture that was suppressed by the Party.  He came upon recordings of folk songs sung by, what seemed to me, ghostly voices of women, fiercely holding onto a tradition that was being systematically wrested from them.  Müller's book is full of such songs, and individuals who sing them.  Their noble purpose may have been not so much the survival of the tradition so much as the ability to just "be."