The Passport--Herta Müller

I should start this review by being as fair as possible to Ms. Müller: despite its brevity, I'm not certain The Passport is a good place to start within Ms. Müller's oeuvre.  If one should choose to begin here, one might be well advised to set aside considerably more time than one would normally invest in a 90 page novella and attempt to swallow the work whole--take it in one large dose.  My feeling, and it is only a feeling, because I did not choose to partake of it in this way, is that it would enhance the experience of the work.  I found as I read the larger part of it while in a hospital waiting room, that the unnerving weirdness recounted in the post yesterday began slowly to work in favor of what would otherwise be a very slight, very overdone tale.

A summary of the mainline of the story suffices to prove the point.  A miller, Windisch, a member of a German ethnic minority in the plains of Romania wants to leave Romania.  To do so, he must obtain a passport--a work requiring many months of bribes and work on his part and a compromise of the virtue of his daughter to be effected.  In the meantime bad agents from the government come and tax the small holding he has to the point where he might have to given up the holding.

Done.  That's all there is.

But Ms. Müller takes this spindly fiber of a story and by judicious choice of detailed weirdness turns it into something out of the early David Lynch.  And because the work is short enough to sustain the effort, The Passport largely succeeds in creating an outlandish, odd, and creepy atmosphere, that is, at times, compellingly interesting.

from The Passport
Herta Müller

Windisch's wife is standing in the yard behind the black grapes. "Aren't you going to mass?" she asks. The grapes grow out of her eyes. The green leaves grow out of her chin.

I'm not leaving the house,"says Windisch., "I don't want people saying to me: now it's your daughter's turn."

Windisch puts his elbows on the table. His hand are heavy. Windisch puts his face in his heavy hands. The veranda doesn't grow. It's broad daylight. For a moment the veranda falls to a place where it never was before. Windisch feels the blow. A stone hangs in his ribs.

Windsich closes his eyes. He feels his eyes. He feels his eyeballs in his hands. His eyes without a face.

With naked eyes and with the stone in his ribs, Windisch says loudly, "A man is nothing but a pheasant in the world." What Windsich hears is not his voice. He feels his naked mouth. It's the walls that have spoken.

This demonstrates both the power and the problem.  Too often I was aware of the writing and I don't mean that in a good way.  I found myself thinking about the writing more than what was being written about.  The very best writing, while compelling and worthy of contemplation as writing, is transparent.  Even Joyce is transparent for all of the verbal fireworks going on.  One gets the feeling of Hemingway locked in a to-the-death struggle with Man Ray and Andre Breton--but, let's be fair, I'm not reading this in German.  I can't.  And it is possible that there is a rhythm, a poetry, and a power in the German that eludes translation into English.  Perhaps these staccato sentences sound very different in their native tongue.

We get even more mannered and more arcane and draw even more attention to the writing in passages such as this:

from The Passport
Herta Müller


Each morning dew fell. The boxwood hedge was sprinkled with white. The stump was black.


The sacristan took the faded roses from the altars and carried them outside behind the church. He passed the stump. The stump was his wife's wooden arm.


Charred leaves whirled around. There was no wind. The leaves were weightless. They rose to his knees. They fell before his steps. The leaves crumbled,. They were soot.


The sacristan took the faded roses from the altars and carried them outside the church. He passed the stump. the stump was his wife's wooden arm.

No, that isn't a transcription error--the fourth paragraph is nearly identical to the second. And this occurs after the episode of . . . well, perhaps I ought not so say more.  Because despite what one might take as the tenor of these comments, this is a book I recommend reading.  I think that my approach to it may have been wrong and may have colored my over-all experience of it, because I found myself falling into the rhythm of the work as I continued to read.  I DID NOT feel that the surrealism in its most extreme expressions was particularly beneficial to either progress or atmosphere, but it did provide moments, such as the short story that precedes the passage excerpted above.


While I don't recommend this book as a place to start in Herta Müller's work, I do find myself thinking that a great many people would both enjoy and derive much from reading this small but dense fable/parable/surreal geste.  Once again, we own a humble debt of thanks to the Nobel committee for bringing this writer to our attention, for selecting a writer of interest NOT for his or her politics (as is sometimes their wont), but because of the intrinsic merit of her work. 


Recommended ****