Creating an imaginative life in a world of misery
By Richard Stern |
June 10, 2012, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
ALTHOUGH the 58 years between the rise of Hitler and the fall of the Soviet Union have been as well documented as any comparable historical period, there are fewer literary accounts of their most evil components than might be expected.
Of course, most of those who suffered directly are dead or otherwise incapacitated, and few indirect sufferers have been sufficiently talented. We do have marvelous books by Primo Levi; "Fatelessness," by Imre Kertesz; Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago"; and perhaps Wiesel's "Night." Now we can add "The Hunger Angel," by the 2009 Nobel laureate Herta Muller.
In January 1945, the Russians demanded that all Romanian Germans between 17 and 45 be relocated to labor camps in the Soviet Union to rebuild the devastated country. Muller's mother was sent there for five years. Half a century later, Muller spent many hours talking with another Romanian victim of that decree, the poet Oskar Pastior. She filled four notebooks with what he told her and planned a book about it with him until he died, suddenly, in 2006. "A year passed before I could bring myself to say farewell to the We and write a novel alone," Muller explains in an afterword to "The Hunger Angel."
The book follows a 17-year-old named Leo Auberg to the labor camp where he works himself to the bone shoveling coal, hauling mortar and clearing slag. His fellow workers drift in and out of Leo's life, scarcely more vivid than his memories and imagined encounters with his parents and grandparents. Indeed, the power of Leo's imagination is the secret both of his survival and of Muller's novel.
We have the brilliant poetic ruminations of this young man as he deals with the slag and coal he digs and heaves every day. They are the landscapes and amorous meetings that his imagination recreates; what holds him to life and us to this book.
The novel is divided into 64 small chapters, some but a few lines long, removing expectations of narrative development. We have recurring characters, both harsh and benevolent, and Leo's eventual return to his family, but the heart of this book is Leo's "urge to invent escape words."
As for the "hunger angel," this is the contrived and somewhat overindulged spirit that broods over his life, interrupts its few pleasures and remains to damn him. In a sense the hunger angel is superfluous: The misery of Leo's days is conveyed by almost everything he's forced to do, almost everything he sees and wishes for.
When you have nothing, Muller told Le Monde, "objects are so important. ... the materials you work with, coal or stone. You wind up personifying them."
The talent and discipline that enabled Muller to do this for her character are what make this book one of the few contributions to the imaginative literature of the concentration camp.
Of course, most of those who suffered directly are dead or otherwise incapacitated, and few indirect sufferers have been sufficiently talented. We do have marvelous books by Primo Levi; "Fatelessness," by Imre Kertesz; Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago"; and perhaps Wiesel's "Night." Now we can add "The Hunger Angel," by the 2009 Nobel laureate Herta Muller.
In January 1945, the Russians demanded that all Romanian Germans between 17 and 45 be relocated to labor camps in the Soviet Union to rebuild the devastated country. Muller's mother was sent there for five years. Half a century later, Muller spent many hours talking with another Romanian victim of that decree, the poet Oskar Pastior. She filled four notebooks with what he told her and planned a book about it with him until he died, suddenly, in 2006. "A year passed before I could bring myself to say farewell to the We and write a novel alone," Muller explains in an afterword to "The Hunger Angel."
The book follows a 17-year-old named Leo Auberg to the labor camp where he works himself to the bone shoveling coal, hauling mortar and clearing slag. His fellow workers drift in and out of Leo's life, scarcely more vivid than his memories and imagined encounters with his parents and grandparents. Indeed, the power of Leo's imagination is the secret both of his survival and of Muller's novel.
We have the brilliant poetic ruminations of this young man as he deals with the slag and coal he digs and heaves every day. They are the landscapes and amorous meetings that his imagination recreates; what holds him to life and us to this book.
The novel is divided into 64 small chapters, some but a few lines long, removing expectations of narrative development. We have recurring characters, both harsh and benevolent, and Leo's eventual return to his family, but the heart of this book is Leo's "urge to invent escape words."
As for the "hunger angel," this is the contrived and somewhat overindulged spirit that broods over his life, interrupts its few pleasures and remains to damn him. In a sense the hunger angel is superfluous: The misery of Leo's days is conveyed by almost everything he's forced to do, almost everything he sees and wishes for.
When you have nothing, Muller told Le Monde, "objects are so important. ... the materials you work with, coal or stone. You wind up personifying them."
The talent and discipline that enabled Muller to do this for her character are what make this book one of the few contributions to the imaginative literature of the concentration camp.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
-
RSS - |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证：沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证：31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证：0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证：沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证：沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.
