Germany
The German session will take place on Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 6pm at the new location of the Goethe-Institut New York: 72 Spring Street, 11th Floor (between Crosby and Lafayette). Subway: Spring Street (6 Train).
To register for this session, send us an email at
germany.nyc@europeanbookclub.org
The Book: The Appointment, by Herta Müller
"I've been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp." Thus begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceausescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before; this time, she believes, will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. "Marry me," the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country.
As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot trying to flee to Hungary, to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them, to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers, and to Paul, her lover, her one source of trust, despite his constant drunkenness. In her distraction, she misses her stop, to find herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the appointment pale by comparison.
Herta Müller pitilessly renders the humiliating terrors of a crushing regime. Bone-spare and intense,
The Appointment confirms her standing as one of Europe's greatest writers.
About the author
Born in Romania in 1953,
Herta Müller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceausescu's Secret Police. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin.
Winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Fiction,
Herta Müller is a highly prolific novelist and essayist whose works portray the human destruction of the Romanian dictatorship and the rootlessness of political exile.
An extensive biography of
Herta Müller can be found at:
http://www.macmillanspeakers.com/speaker.aspx?name=hertamuller
For further information, please visit the Goethe-Institut website:
http://www.goethe.de/kue/lit/aug/en5360302.htm
The Reviews
The New York Times: “A brooding, fog-shrouded allegory of life under the long oppression of the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu.” (
Full review)
Newsday: “Powerful...Müller achieves something beautiful. She has wrested poetry from one woman’s desire to remain human in an inhuman system.”
The San Francisco Chronicle: “Müller scatters narrative bombshells across a field of dreams.”
Bookforum: “With terse poetry, Müller brings to life a profoundly moving world...the lyrical beauty of the prose and its unflinching moral and emotional honesty carry the reader.”
"I've been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp." Thus begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceausescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before; this time, she believes, will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. "Marry me," the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country.
As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot trying to flee to Hungary, to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them, to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers, and to Paul, her lover, her one source of trust, despite his constant drunkenness. In her distraction, she misses her stop, to find herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the appointment pale by comparison.
Herta Müller pitilessly renders the humiliating terrors of a crushing regime. Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment confirms her standing as one of Europe's greatest writers.