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A review by coffeebooksrepeat
The Land of Green Plums by Herta Müller
4.0
I dropped a Lispector because I had difficulty reading it, only to pick up another book that’s even harder to read.
The Land of Green Plums by Herta Müller, set in Romania during the dictatorship of Ceaușescu, is a story of young individuals wanting to be free, to run free -- free from their impoverished lives in the provinces and free from despotic leadership.
The book started engrossing. I was flipping pages faster than expected and even failed to notice I was already around 30-40 pages in it. Then came the first suicide. I don’t know if it’s just me, but after the death of Lola, the writing style got more and more fragmentary. Have you ever tried having a diary while you were younger? You just kept on writing whenever you like, whatever you want, sometimes continuing one subject and other times starting a new one unrelated to the previous entry.
Müller was not only able to capture the fear of the characters but also that of the regime. The latter may have all the machinery to preserve its position, yet it still consistently feared one thing — education. Like all other despots, they fear the learned, the educated.
Every time I was reading it, be it in the car, the house, or at the office, I almost always wanted to be somewhere else. It is one of those books which require the readers to be in a dim-lit room where wood creaks are welcome distractions, and good lighting is not mandatory.
If you have the heart for it, read it at your risk.
The Land of Green Plums by Herta Müller, set in Romania during the dictatorship of Ceaușescu, is a story of young individuals wanting to be free, to run free -- free from their impoverished lives in the provinces and free from despotic leadership.
The book started engrossing. I was flipping pages faster than expected and even failed to notice I was already around 30-40 pages in it. Then came the first suicide. I don’t know if it’s just me, but after the death of Lola, the writing style got more and more fragmentary. Have you ever tried having a diary while you were younger? You just kept on writing whenever you like, whatever you want, sometimes continuing one subject and other times starting a new one unrelated to the previous entry.
Müller was not only able to capture the fear of the characters but also that of the regime. The latter may have all the machinery to preserve its position, yet it still consistently feared one thing — education. Like all other despots, they fear the learned, the educated.
Every time I was reading it, be it in the car, the house, or at the office, I almost always wanted to be somewhere else. It is one of those books which require the readers to be in a dim-lit room where wood creaks are welcome distractions, and good lighting is not mandatory.
If you have the heart for it, read it at your risk.