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 "The Hunger Angel," Nobel laureate Herta Muller 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.
Muller 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.
General
Imprint: |
Picador USA
|
Country of origin: |
United States |
Release date: |
April 2013 |
First published: |
April 2013 |
Authors: |
Herta Muller
|
Dimensions: |
210 x 145 x 21mm (L x W x T) |
Format: |
Paperback - Trade
|
Pages: |
290 |
ISBN-13: |
978-1-250-03208-9 |
Categories: |
Books >
Fiction >
Genre fiction >
Historical fiction
|
LSN: |
1-250-03208-3 |
Barcode: |
9781250032089 |
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