Traveling on one leg /

Two excellent new works from eastern Europe reveal a region at odds with itself, clutching to the remains of a past it wants to forget. Blatnik, a Slovenian with several collections and novels in his native country, comes across well in his first English translation. This collection of stories is full of sharp, finely honed observations of everyday life. Some are full-length stories, like the odd relationship farce of "Scratches on the Back," in which the wife of an architect's coworker suddenly moves into the architect's life; others are blunt prose poems of a page or less. Though his themes--love, desperation, loss, redemption--are universal, there is something detached in his narration that places him firmly in the East. Muller is even more bleak and unrevealing. Her story of the Romanian Irene emigrating to Germany is told in cold, staccato bursts. The effect is at once distancing and magnetic, as she slowly unravels Irene's new life and her friendship with three men in the new country. Muller, winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Award for her novel (in English) The Land of Green Plums (1986), herself emigrated to Germany from Romania in 1987. She cannily evokes the ridiculousness and disorientation of immigrant life: at one point Irene holds number 503 in the immigration office waiting room, though she is the only one there. Both books are highly recommended for collections of European and new fiction. --David Cline

For some, the pain of exile is too great even to be named. So it is for Irene, the 35-year-old protagonist of this slender but intense novel. In the 1980s, Irene has emigrated to West Germany from an unnamed Eastern bloc country to escape political persecution. Adrift in Berlin, living first in a refugee hostel and then in an anonymous apartment complex, Irene struggles to maintain her sanity while caught in an ambiguously romantic quadrangle with three men. First there is Franz, a student a decade her junior; then there is his friend Stefan, a sociologist; last is Stefan's friend Thomas, a gay man in perpetual emotional crisis. But Irene's largest preoccupation is with herself, and the novel presents a knife-sharp portrait of her acute isolation and uprootedness. Irene's anxiety as she faces her adoptive homeland's hectoring refugee bureaucracy, her unsentimental observation of Berlin street life and her rigorously controlled homesickness is depicted in spare prose that is never less than striking. The reader with a distaste for indirection, or for the kind of heroine who considers children "eerie because they're still growing," will find this novel slow going. But those patient enough to pick out the plot line amid the poetry will be rewarded with a small trove of unforgettable images. (Oct.) FYI: Mller, a Romanian refugee living in Germany, is the recipient of the Kleist Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her novel The Land of Green Plums is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The first English translation of an earlier work (published in 1992) from the acclaimed M†ller (The Land of Green Plums, 1996) is a profound story of dislocation: an exile from Romania struggles to find her bearings in Berlin just before the end of the Cold War. Even in her native land, Irene was already something of a stranger, taking long walks by the sea partly because she knew there would be an old man, waiting in the bushes, who would masturbate while looking at her. A chance encounter on the beach with a young, drunken German provides her with someone she knows when she crosses the border for good, but Franz, fearful of commitment, can't bear to meet her at the airport, sending his friend Stefan to make the connection instead. While Irene endures the scrutiny of German bureaucrats before receiving relocation aid and citizenship, she also suffers a malaise of the heart brought on by the mixed messages of Franz, Stefan, and, finally Stefan's friend Thomas, who, though the most responsive to her, is also bisexual. Irene settles into a routine in her new Berlin apartment, a routine regularly punctuated by visits to or visits from her men and supplemented by her daily observations of the beer-bellied construction worker who labors on the scaffolding outside her window. It's a life of waiting, of anomie and despair, but for all that it's the bitterness of such an existence that she keenly feels and sharply observes. Through it all, Irene knows she will endure. With a cool, minimalist style that simulates alienation, this fictional bleakness is not an easy read, but even in its now-dated Cold War milieu, it dramatizes a fact that seems fundamentally human: that, somehow, everyone is alone. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.