Purchase
Metropolitan Books
May 2012
On Sale: April 24, 2012
304 pages
ISBN: 080509301X
EAN: 9780805093018
Kindle: B0071W50Y6
Hardcover / e-Book
Add to Wish List
Fiction
A masterful new novel from the winner of the 2009 Nobel
Prize, hailed for depicting the "landscape of the
dispossessed" with "the concentration of poetry and the
frankness of prose" (Nobel Prize Committee) It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came
for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in
the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a
coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks,
mixing mortar, and battling the relentless calculus of
hunger that governed the labor colony: one shovel load of
coal is worth one gram of bread. In her new novel, Nobel laureate Herta Müller calls upon her
unique combination of poetic intensity and dispassionate
precision to conjure the distorted world of the labor camp
in all its physical and moral absurdity. She has given Leo
the language to express the inexpressible, as hunger
sharpens his senses into an acuity that is both
hallucinatory and profound. In scene after disorienting
scene, the most ordinary objects accrue tender poignancy as
they acquire new purpose—a gramophone box serves as a
suitcase, a handkerchief becomes a talisman, an enormous
piece of casing pipe functions as a lovers' trysting place.
The heart is reduced to a pump, the breath mechanized to the
rhythm of a swinging shovel, and coal, sand, and snow have a
will of their own. Hunger becomes an insatiable angel who
haunts the camp, but also a bare-knuckled sparring partner,
delivering blows that keep Leo feeling the rawest connection
to life. Müller has distilled Leo's struggle into words of
breathtaking intensity that take us on a journey far beyond
the Gulag and into the depths of one man's soul.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2024 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy