… derived from Kleist and Kafka, that fits snugly, in our time, to the dull needy nastiness of life under authoritarian regimes.
I’ve been reading, this morning, Herta Müller’s novel The Land of Green Plums (1993; English translation, 1996), and it’s just that sort of thing — a deadpan chronicle of psychic and physical degradation under the Ceausescus. Excerpts:
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As she speaks, something gets stuck on her tongue. The child thinks, it can only be the truth sticking to her tongue like a cherrystone that refuses to go down. As long as her voice keeps rising to her ears, she will wait for the truth. But once her voice grows silent, thinks the child, everything will have turned out to be a lie, since the truth has gone tumbling down her throat.
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Father keeps the graveyards deep in his throat, between his collar and his chin, near his Adam’s apple. That way the graveyards can never pass his lips. His mouth drinks schnapps made from the darkest plums, and his songs for the Fuhrer are heavy and drunken.
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There were fleas in the closets because there were fleas in the beds, in the suitcases with the patent stockings, in the long corridor. And in the eating area as well, and in the shower room, and in the cafeteria, there were fleas. In the trams, in the shops, in the movie theater.
Everyone has to scratch as they pray, Lola writes in her notebook. She went to church every Sunday morning. The priest has to scratch himself as well. Our Father, Who art in Heaven, writes Lola, here the whole city is alive with fleas.
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The bodega, too, was a lie, with its tablecloths and plants, its bottles and the red-wine uniforms of its waiters. Here no one was a guest, they were all just refugees from a meaningless afternoon.
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You could feel the dictator and his guards hovering over all the secret escape plans, you could feel them lurking and doling out fear.
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A mother takes the train into the city every week. The child is allowed to accompany her twice a year. Once at the beginning of summer, and once at the beginning of winter. The child feels ugly in town because she’s bundled up in so much thick clothing. The mother takes the child to the station at four in the morning. It’s cold, even in early summer it’s still cold at four in the morning. The mother wants to be in the city by eight, because that’s when the stores open.
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That last paragraph conveys the prose style I’m talking about. Anonymous — the mother, the child. Dully, robotically redundant: A mother. The child. The child. The mother. The content details the humiliating, unnatural conditions of life under the regime, but everything really gets conveyed by the affectless, dead-on-the-page prose, as if to say This world is so beyond belief, so incredible in its injustice and its distortions of human life, that it has killed the souls of the people who live in it. Dead prose for dead souls.