Tag-Archive for ◊ destitution ◊

Author:
• Saturday, June 18th, 2011

Herta Müller was born in 1953 of farmer parents from the German speaking minority enclave village of Nitzkydorf (Nitchidorf) in the Banat in Romania. The majority of the German speaking peoples of this part of Romania originally came from Swabia (Schwaben) in Germany.

From 1973 to 1976, Müller left her village to study German and Romanian literature at the university of Timisoara. She then worked as a translator but was dismissed in 1979 because of her unwillingness to cooperate with Ceaucescu’s secret police. She became a kindergarten teacher while giving German language lessons in private. The success of Müller’s first novel, Nadirs, published in 1982, encouraged her to become a novelist, a poet and an essayist.

Müller has received various prestigious awards: in 1984 she received the Aspekte Literaturpreise for Niederungen (Nadirs), the Marie Luise Fleisser Prize, the Ricarda Huch Prize in 1989, the Kleist Prize in 1994 and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary award in 1998. She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.

After a first emigration refusal by the authorities in 1985, she finally obtained permission to emigrate to West Germany in 1987 with her husband, the Romanian German novelist, Richard Wagner. She currently lives in Hamburg.

Müller was well known for her writing about the bleak, oppressive conditions that Romanian people had to endure under Ceausescu’s despotic, communist regime and consequently her books were censored. She was a member of Aktionsgruppe Banat, a group of German speaking writers who, frustrated by all the censorship, were calling for freedom of speech.

Herta Müller has been labelled one of the most talented and prolific German writers of the last twenty years. All her novels are set in Romania, but unfortunately not all her work has been translated from German.

Nadirs, originally written in German and published in Romania in 1982, then in Germany in 1984, was published in English in 1999. It’s Herta Müller’s first book, a semi-autobiographical novel with no traditional plot, in a form of a diary of fifteen short stories of various length. The narrator is a little girl who writes about her thoughts, her deeds, her fate and the destiny of the people surrounding her. It is also about how she perceives the bleak, repressive existence in the lowlands where she lives with her family, under the grim, authoritarian and corrupt communist regime of the unnamed Ceausescu.

The novel conveys the little girl’s unadorned, honest, acute description of everyday life, sketched in unrelated segments which have in common the importance that the girl bestows on them. She is often mixing reality with dreams which then become overwhelming fantasies that lead to delusions.

Herta Müller has an uncommon style of writing, disjointed and bare, misleadingly simple but deeply effective. Her usage of allegories, imageries, symbolism, contrasts and succinct language make this thin novel brim over with poignantly powerful, vivid pictures of rural life in the lowlands, presumably, in Nitchidorf in the Banat, Müller’s native region.

The author uses all these illustrations to disclose the little girl’s rough and innermost afflicted childhood and establish her psychologically disturbed character. She seems to be surviving rather than living the care free life of a child of her age.

The author’s choice of words and the somberly intense, devastating social atmosphere of destitution, sexual looseness, alcoholism, injustice, suffering and confinement, is almost Kafkaesque, without a glimpse of hope and is too dark and morose and nightmare-like.

For all these multiple reasons and hidden complexities, Nadirs is a novel that has to be read in little portions at a time with a fair amount of assiduity. “When laughter becomes guffawing, when they bend with laughter, is there any hope? And yet we are so young”. “Your eyes are empty. Your feeling is empty and stale. It’s a pity about you, girl, it’s a pity”. Black Park.

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Author:
• Friday, October 24th, 2008

Susie Vereker, daughter of an army officer, was born in the Lake District in northern England. She spent a great deal of her life travelling, first with her parents and later with her diplomat husband. She was in Germany, Thailand, Australia, Greece, Switzerland and France, and spent much of her life trying to adapt to the countries and their traditions.

She became a widow in 2001 after a long and happy marriage, has three sons, and now lives in a small Hampshire village in the south of England. Susie Vereker was nominated for the RNA Foster Grant Award 2006, for her novel Pond Lane and Paris.

Susie Vereker has written three books to date:
Pond Lane and Paris published in 2005.
An Old-Fashioned Arrangement published in 2006.
Paris Imperfect will be published in December 2008.

An Old-Fashioned Arrangement, like the Pilot’s wife by Anita Shreve, commences with a wife who receives the visit of her husband’s office colleagues, at home early one morning. They announce his death in a plane crash in the Indonesian jungle, while on a business trip. Bewildered and under the shock, Kim, the charismatic and life-like main character, tries to gather all her strength in order to sort things out for the sake of her 11-year old son, James. Like Kathryn did the best she could to protect her 16-year old daughter Mattie in The Pilot’s Wife.

But unlike The Pilot’s Wife, the atmosphere in the Old-Fashioned Arrangement is less gloomy, less cold and oppressive. The story takes place in beautiful, peaceful and wealthy Geneva, which contrasts with the state of destitution that English expatriate Kim finds herself thrown into after her husband’s sudden, unexpected death. She is penniless, she has been following her unreliable, egoistic husband, Richard, round the world without any pension or cover scheme, even the money in their bank account has been withdrawn by him.

She will now have to leave the comfortable house in the privileged Genevan suburb, Cologny, within a month, without knowing where to go. Her Swiss neighbour and landlord, Henri, who always silently fancied her, besides liking her son James, proposed “An Old- Fashioned Arrangement” to her. “The arrangement” was meant to help Kim solve her financial problems and lead a care free life without uprooting her young son.

Kim is in her forties and Henri is a refined old gentleman who loves women. For her to become his mistress is against her ethics. She goes through a dilemma before accepting the proposal, but finally, having no family, hardly any friends and no home base due to her nomadic life, Kim sees no other choice but to follow her female instinct and succumbs to the offer. She accepts the deal for the security of herself and her son and not out of love.

But she will end up loving and caring for her guardian angel, Henri, to the extent of refusing the advances of Mark, the handsome English diplomat she happened to meet after her relationship with Henri. But after Henri dies, Kim who now knows the taste of freedom, will take more care before accepting to marry Mark. She will want to know him better before tying her life to his. Age and experience have taught Kim to be wiser, rational and less emotional.

Kim didn’t love her husband, Richard. She was even thinking of a divorce and his death would have been a relief if it wasn’t for the lack of money to survive. All these years she depended on her husband and now she will learn,at last,what it feels like to be emancipated.

The characters in the novel are very realistic, humane and well portrayed, any woman in the world can identify with Kim’s big problem, which makes it difficult for readers not to feel involved, especially with the author’s endearing and humoristic style of writing.

Although lighthearted, this novel treats a serious issue and has several unexpected suspense elements, in combination with a few twists, which makes it difficult to put down.