The Passport

Reviews / Votes

With the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, Mueller depicts the language of the dispossessed -- Jury of the Nobel Prize for Literature Appropriately on the side of underdogs from Ceausescu's dystopia to Ukrainian labour camps... so opening the eyes of non-German readers to new worlds. And that, from Beowulf to Mueller, is a noble as well as a Nobel function of literature * The Times * Especially now, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's a beautiful signal that such high quality literature and this life experience are being honoured * Angela Merkel * [Muller's] dark, closely observed and sometimes violent work often explores exile and the grim quotidian realities of life under Ceausescu... Her sensibility is often bleak, but the detail in her fiction can whip it alive * New York Times * Graphically observed... forces the reader to confront the complex tapestry of Eastern European history in the late 20th Century. And although the author left Romania in the 1980s, she remains interested in the issues of oppression and exile, which makes her a universal writer -- Razia Iqbal, BBC Arts Correspondent Mueller is courageous and has summoned her surrealist imagination to brilliant effect when exposing the horrors of totalitarianism... The Passport, which was published in Berlin in 1986, months before she fled Romania, is an almost allegorical elegy of village life dominated by the need to escape.... Mueller uses the quality of European folk tale to brilliant effect. Set in a German village in Romania where the people dream of a different life in the West, the story is true to any country in which fantasy is the only escape from oppression... Politics and truth-telling, the courage of the witness and the weight of the message often decides the Nobel Literature Prize; in Herta Mueller all of these elements are present, yet so too is the artist as the lone voice beckoning, intent on telling a story, on shaping a word picture -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times * Mueller has an eye for the surreal detail of a police state and has made it into strong, muscular literature * The Times * Praise for The Passport: A phenomenal, moving and humbling novel, perhaps the most memorable read of the autumn * Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung * Herta Mueller's language is the purest poetry. Every sentence has the rhythm of poetry, indeed is a poem or a painting * Nurnerger Nachrichten * Herta Muller portrays a community that is breaking up, a dying village whose German inhabitants all seek to emigrate. At the centre stands the miller Windisch waiting for his passport. Bribing the mayor with sacks of flour proved in vain - so, now, in a rage of helpnessness, he has to allow his daughter to visit the militiaman and the priest, to search for passports and baptismal certificates in their beds. The dirty realities of a totalitarian state... a chilling, far-sighted and lyrical graveside speech for a sad village in a sad land * Neue Zurcher Zeitung * Praise for The Land of Green Plums: A novel of graphically observed detail in which the author seeks to create a sort of poetry out of the spiritual and material ugliness of life in Communist Romania * New York Times * A powerful autobiographical account, The Land of Green Plums... will linger on in the mind * Guardian * The Land of Green Plums is a miracle, a fearless human testimony which operates through the combined force of Mueller's tight, understated eloquence * Irish Times * If W G Sebald's The Emigrants suggested there are still new ways of writing about exile and the Holocaust, The Land of Green Plums promises similar possibilities for the literature of the Iron Curtain * Literary Review * Praise for The Appointment: A brooding, fog-shrouded allegory of life under the long oppression of the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu * New York Times * [The Appointment] Mueller scatters narrative bombshells across a field of dreams * San Francisco Chronicle * What heightens this bleak vision is her startling, hallucinatory use of metaphor and surreal imagery -- Jessica Holland * Observer * At once spare and poetic, this novella-length tale nevertheless attains the epic ponderousness that defines recent Laureates -- Hephzibah Anderson * Daily Mail * A swift, stinging narrative, fable-like in its stoic concision and painterly detail * Philadelphia Inquirer * Mueller writes with elegant simplicity, in the great tradition of German storytelling - this would not look out of place in Hebel's The Treasure Chest. -- Kate Saunders * The Times * Mueller provides a master class in sparse, clear prose, and conveys the bleakness of humanity, with the occasional touch of dark, bitter magic - fully earning her Nobel Prize for literature this year... Often harrowing, startling, as devoid of decoration as the world she is describing, Mueller's work demands to be read. -- Lesley McDowell * Independent on Sunday * This short novel expands in the mind to occupy an emotional space far beyond its short length or the seeming simplicity of its story. -- Tadzio Martin Koelb * TLS * The Passport, the first of her novels to be translated into English, is a stunning introduction to her jewel-like prose, hard and clear as a diamond. * Sacramento Book Review, USA * I am struck by her sparse yet poetic language...it reminds very much of our literature during apartheid, although this one is of a very high literary merit. -- Zakes Mda * Sunday Independent, South Africa *