“At the time I still believed that in a world without guards people would walk differently from the way we do in our country. Where people are allowed to think and write differently, I thought, they will also walk differently.”
I pick the books I read somewhat haphazardly by what sounds interesting at a given moment, but sometimes relax by researching new books to read. Sometimes this is easy––checking to see what favorite authors have published recently––other searches take more creativity, particularly in order to widen the range of voices I read books by. In one search late last year for non-English-language fiction about totalitarian regimes written by women I found The Queue, which I wrote about earlier, and this one, Herta Müller’s The Land of Green Plums.
Set at the height of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s reign of terror in Romania, The Land of Green Plums is a gripping, ethereal tale centered on the story of an unnamed young woman trying to survive in a land dominated by criminals and thieves. The story opens in a girls’ dormitory where the residents improvise mascara out of spit and soot, dream of nylons, and trade sexual favors for organ meat of slaughtered animals. And then Lola, a young girl who dreamed of studying Russian at university, hangs herself in the closet.
Life continues. At school the narrator makes friends with three men, Edgar, Kurt, and Georg, all German-speaking Romanians with whom she dreams about a better life, writing poetry and talking about freedom. All the while they expect to be arrested. The end of school scatters across the country, but they agree to write and institute a code––a hair in the seal of the envelope and particular phrases meant to reassure that they are alright and detect the Securitate reading their missives. Of course, having three male friends complicates the narrator’s life since it leads to gossip that she sleeps with all of them.
In this period after school, Müller puts a name and face to the society tormenting the narrator (Captain Pjele) and builds out a cast of the oppressed, particularly in the form of her friend Tereza. Pjele repeatedly torments the narrator, and subjects her to all manner of abuses and degradations, and she wants nothing more than to vandalize his home. He continues to terrorize her even after her departure, sending death threats to her new residence in Germany. Tereza, by contrast, is a victim of society who befriends the narrator on Pjele’s order and doesn’t feel capable of escaping even as a tumor grows unchecked on her underarm.
I found the plot of The Land of Green Plums like trying to follow a half-remembered dream, but the its greatest strength is its beauty. Müller’s prose is hauntingly beautiful whether depicting the frustrations of oppression or, especially, when capturing a fleeting moment of tranquility despite it all:
“Here no one was a guest, they were all just refugees from a meaningless afternoon.”
Although not explicitly autobiographical, the narrator’s life loosely follows Müller’s experience living in and escaping from Ceaușescu’s Romania, which imbues The Land of Green Plums with the gross indignities and the tiny joys that continue to exist within under such a regime. Trauma is laced throughout the novel, but so too are hope, fear, petty jealousies, and even guilt.
And yet, my response to the book was in the end mixed. I liked The Land of Green Plums, but reading it was like falling into a fugue state almost as though it was magical realism. Elements of this disassociation contributed to why individual scenes will stay with me even while the book as a whole may not.
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Through a month of online teaching, my state of mind is more “existential dread” than “bored.” My employment transitioned online, creating a load of new work, but it is set to end in about a month. Meanwhile, fallout from COVID-19 has canceled multiple jobs that I had either interviewed or applied for and dried up the prospects of continuing in the positions I have been teaching, even as a short-term bridge.
Despite all this, I have still been reading, recently finishing Vassilis Vassilikos’ Z, Donna Zuckerberg’s Not All Dead White Men, Bilge Karasu’s The Garden of Departed Cats, Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity, and Daniel Stone’s The Food Explorer. I hope to review some or all of these in the near future.
Noodlings 