A review by korrick
The Appointment by Herta Müller

4.0

Everything happened in a twinkling, the time it takes for one person to assault another.

Müller's Nobel Prize speech is transcribed at the end of this edition, a bonus the cover did not hint at that other editions could learn from, and among other thought provoking paragraphs was her probing the susceptibility of engineers and the like to making homunculi out of their creations. I already knew a number of beautiful words having to do with lubricated hydraulic machine parts: DOVETAIL, GOOSENECK, ACORN NUTS, and EYEBOLTS, she says, and so I left off characterizing her plot structure as the shuttering swift sidings of looms and thought of maelstroms instead. Capturing the linear side of things is all very well, but we are no Arachne in our weaving and wiggling our way out of the unyielding desire of the eye.

You feel fine because you’ve forgotten what that means for other people.

The Wiki page for the author already rhapsodized on about Kafka, so I'll save us both some ethos and think instead on past and future. If you let it, the narrative will explain all that needs be expounded, letting even a novice in Romanian tinged literature such as myself into its endless bowels. When the final page is turned, you'll have the comfort of your narrator's closure, for you'll know exactly how she came to be here and where she has utmost need to go. Whether you accept the lines drawn by death and madness by that point is another matter entirely.

On the way I thought: How bizarre that something so beautiful could be up in the sky, with no law down here on earth forbidding people to look at it.

The matter of her being a woman may be a turnoff to some, for the cruelty aimed so casually and frequently at female bodies is the same regardless of political leanings, souring those feel good leavings that horror stories of Communism inevitably leave on the democratically inclined. It's not nearly as difficult as Morrison and Jelinek, but it is said, and unlike the others dwells on many a tale of daughters fucking fathers (note the order and implicated position) and other sundry tales of female lust, so maybe there is something to be said about that Communism business in conjunction with the patriarchy. Or not, but whether 'twas meaning or null, it was worth noting, for superstitious warding off harm before the next appointment share with a sought out sex an ultimate need for control.

First look left and then look right, son, to see if a car's coming. That's important when you're crossing a street but it's a dangerous way to think.

Hell hath no fury like a man offended.