Review by New York Times Review
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 (who dismissed the film "Schindler's List" as kitsch); Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago"; and perhaps Wiesel's "Night," but it's a small list. Now we can add "The Hunger Angel," by the 2009 Nobel laureate Herta Müller. 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. Müller's mother was sent there for five years. Half a century later, Müller 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," Müller 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 Müller's novel. There is no narrative here comparable to the "Huck Finn in Auschwitz" story of "Fatelessness" or the autobiographical encounters and speculations in Levi's "Periodic Table" and "If This Is a Man"; what we have instead are the brilliant poetic ruminations and transformations of this young man as he deals with the slag and coal he digs and heaves from dawn to dusk every day. They are the landscapes and amorous meetings that his imagination recreates. They are what holds him to life and us to this book. The novel is divided into 64 small chapters, some but a few lines long. This removes the sting of the endless descriptions and our expectations of narrative development. We do have recurring characters, both harsh and benevolent, and Leo's eventual return to his family (including a baby brother he resents for drawing attention from his amazing, terrible years), 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, Müller said in an interview for Le Monde, "objects are so important. . . . Even work becomes an object, even the materials you work with, coal or stone. You are stripped of yourself and must redefine that self. Objects allow this. You wind up personifying them, to orient yourself." The talent and discipline that enabled Müller to do this for her character are what make this book one of the few contributions to the imaginative literature of the concentration camp. Richard Stern's books include "Golk" (1960), "Still on Call" (2010) and the collected stories "Almonds to Zhoof" (2005).
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 10, 2012]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Muller (The Land of Green Plums), winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, introduces readers to Leo Auberg, a young closeted homosexual German-Romanian who recalls in powerfully vivid vignettes the delirium of the five "skinandbones" years he spent in a Soviet forced labor camp. Charged with "rebuilding" the war-torn Soviet Union, workers struggle under the specter of the figurative "hunger angel" and the work camp's absurd mathematics of misery, which hold that "1 shovel load [of coal] = 1 gram bread." Leo's voice is wry and poetic, and Muller's evocative language makes the abstract concrete as her narrator's sanity is stretched; Leo posits that "Hunger is an object," and that death lives in the hollows of the cheeks as a white hare. Indeed, Leo's grimly surreal meditations on hunger seem all the more true for their strangeness; the cold slag in which he toils smells "a little like lilacs" and his "sweaty neck like honey tea." Juxtaposed with Leo's musings are observations on life in the camp, and brief dramas with other workers. Under Muller's influence, the subject matter not only begs a reader's sympathy, but deftly illuminates the complex psychological state of starvation and displacement, wherein the physical world is reconstituted according to the skewed architecture of oppression and suffering. Boehm's translation preserves the integrity of Muller's gorgeous prose, and Leo's despondent reveries are at once tragic and engrossing. (Apr. 24) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
This novel of the Gulag was first published in Germany in 2009, the same year that its German-Romanian author won the Nobel Prize. Mller was born in 1953 and raised in a German-speaking enclave of Romania. In 1945 the Red Army had deported thousands from these enclaves to forced labor camps on the Russian steppe. Years later, the recollections of one of the former deportees inspired her to write this novel. Her narrator, 17-year-old Leo Auberg, has just started having sex with men in the park, fearfully, risking jail; when the soldiers come calling, he's glad to escape his watchful small town. That gladness disappears on the cattle cars. Dignity goes too, as the deportees are ordered off the train to do their business in a snowy field. What follows are dozens of short sections as Leo riffs on conditions in the camp. He will do different kinds of work: unloading coal, servicing the boilers, loading pitch in a trench. That last assignment is life-threatening, but before he succumbs to a fever Leo notes that "the air shimmered, like an organza cape made of glass dust." The poetic sensibility sets the novel apart. There is a much-hated adjutant, a German like themselves, but it is hunger, death's henchman, that is their greatest adversary. Leo fights it in practical ways: begging door to door, saving or trading his bread (echoes of Solzhenitsyn). But he also uses a kind of reverse psychology when he calls this devil hunger an angel. The inversion is crucial to Leo's morale and survival. Keep the enemy off balance. Flatter him; be gallant. This may sound whimsical, but there is steel in the writing. Mller's work is not without flaws. Leo's sexual orientation is not well integrated into the narrative; his post-camp experiences are too compressed. The novel is still a notable addition to labor camp literature.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
