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The Appointment (Paperback)
Herta Muller; Translated by Michael Hulse, Philip Boehm
1
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R245
Discovery Miles 2 450
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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'I've been summoned, Thursday, ten sharp.' So begins one day in the
life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceausescu's
totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before, but this time
she knows it will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the
linings of men's suits bound for Italy. 'Marry me', the notes say,
with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country.As
she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her
friend Lilli, shot while trying to flee to Hungary; to her
grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them; to
Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet
kiss on her fingers; and to Paul, her lover and the one person she
can trust. In her distraction, she misses her stop and finds
herself on an unfamiliar street.And what she discovers there
suddenly puts her fear of the appointment into chilling
perspective. Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment is a pitiless
rendering of the terrors of a crushing regime.
Romania, the last months of the dictator's regime. Adina is a young
schoolteacher. Paul is a musician. Clara, Adina's friend, works in
a wire factory. Pavel is Clara's lover. But one of them works for
the secret police and is reporting on the group. One day Adina
returns home to discover that her fox fur rug has had its tail cut
off. On another day, a hindleg. Then a foreleg. The mutilation is a
sign that she is being tracked - the fox was ever the hunter.
Images of photographic precision combine to form a kaleidoscope of
reflections, deflections and deceit. Adina and her friends struggle
to keep living in a world permeated with fear, where even the eyes
of a cat seem complicit with the watchful eye of the state, and
where it's hard to tell the victim apart from the perpetrator.
Simon Schama, in defence of the essay in the age of Twitter,
writes: 'The self-propulsion of a ranging intelligence is the
dynamo that drives a powerful essay; the headlong gallop of thought
to a destination the reader can't predict and which may not have
occurred to the writer when he began.' That power, that propulsion,
that surprise is evident in every one of this selection of the very
finest of the essays produced over the past 20 years by the
Romanian-German Nobel Laureate Herta Muller. She interrogates
Communist society - especially in its bizarre Romanian Ceausescu
variation - and matters of complicity, secrecy, betrayal, guilt,
responsibility, resistance and the power of literature. Her writing
is bewitching and convincing; her approach is unswerving, unsparing
and undeluded. Her reader is grateful. These are among the most
powerful demonstrations of the pen's might exceeding the sword's to
be produced in the last forty years in Europe.
To create the poems in this collection, Nobel Prize-winner Herta
Muller cut up countless newspapers and magazines in search of
striking phrases, words, or even fragments of words, which she then
arranged in a the form of a collage. Father's on the Phone with the
Flies presents seventy-three of Muller's collage poems for the
first time in English translation, alongside full-color
reproductions of the originals. Muller takes full advantage of the
collage form, generating poems rich in wordplay, ambiguity, and
startling, surreal metaphors the disruption and dislocation at
their core rendered visible through stark contrasts in color, font,
and type size. Liberating words from conformity and coercion,
Muller renders them fresh and invests them forcefully with personal
experience. Sure to thrill any fan of contemporary literature,
Father's on the Phone with the Flies is an unexpected, exciting
work from one of the most protean writers ever to win the Nobel.
From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2009 'Just as the
father in the house in which we live is our father, so Comrade
Nicolae Ceausescu is the father of our country. And just as the
mother in the house in which we live is our mother, so Comrade
Elena Ceausescu is the mother of our country. Comrade Nicolae
Ceausescu is the father of our children. All the children love
comrade Nicolae and comrade Elena, because they are their parents.'
The Passport is a beautiful, haunting novel whose subject is a
German village in Romania caught between the stifling hopelessness
of Ceausescu's dictatorship and the glittering temptations of the
West. Stories from the past are woven together with the problems
Windisch, the village miller, faces after he applies for permission
to migrate to West Germany. Herta Muller describes with poetic
attention the dreams and superstitions, conflicts and oppression of
a forgotten region, the Banat, in the Danube Plain. In sparse,
lyrical language, Herta Muller captures the forlorn plight of a
trapped people. This edition is translated by Martin Chalmers, with
a new foreword by Paul Bailey. Also by Herta Muller: Nadirs, The
Land of Green Plums, The Appointment, and The Hunger Angel.
In 1987 Fabio Ponzio decided to embark on a photographic odyssey in
search of Eastern Europe. When he arrived in Poland the country was
on the verge of collapse. There was little food in the shops and
the queues to buy bread were immense. In Ceausescu's Romania,
people's lives were reduced to a succession of dark days; the
Securitate wielded absolute control and used informants, bribery
and violence to beat any instinct for freedom out of individuals.
In the same period, in Yugoslavia, the beginnings of what was to
become the catastrophe of successive years were being laid out,
while the West looked on in supreme indifference. In the autumn of
1989, everything changed. The various regimes of the communist
countries of Central and Eastern Europe began to collapse in
Budapest, Berlin, Warsaw, Prague, Sofia and Bucharest in a domino
effect that continued in Albania and ended two years later in the
Soviet Union. Ponzio continued his travels across an immense
territory with a Leica, three Nikons and 100 rolls of film, in
search of the people of the East, documenting the old energy that
had been fortified through pain and sacrifice, now joined by a new
energy, full of hope. Year after year, Ponzio returned to capture
the many faces and stark differences of the other Europe, in search
of the elements that make up the shared destiny of the peoples of
Eastern Europe. Collected here are his stunning portraits of their
traditions and faith, humility and courage, vulnerability and
survival.
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The Appointment (Paperback)
Herta Muller; Translated by Michael Hulse, Philip Boehm
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R487
R405
Discovery Miles 4 050
Save R82 (17%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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From the winner of the IMPAC Award and the 2009 Nobel Prize in
Literature, a fierce and devastating novel about a young woman's
discovery of betrayal in the most intimate reaches of her life
"I've been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp." Thus begins a day in the
life of a young factory worker during Ceausescu's totalitarian
regime. She has been questioned before; this time, she believes,
will be worse. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's
suits bound for Italy. "Marry me," the notes say, with her name and
address. Anything to get out of Romania.
As each tram stop brings the young woman closer to the appointment,
her thoughts stray to her father and his infidelities; to her
friend Lilli, shot trying to flee to Hungary; to her grandparents,
deported after her own husband informed on them; and to Paul, her
lover, her one source of trust despite his drunkenness. In her
distraction, she misses her stop and finds herself on an unfamiliar
street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the
interrogation pale by comparison.
Bone-spare and intense, "The Appointment" powerfully renders the
humiliating terrors of a crushing regime and its corrosive effects
on family and friendship, sex and love.
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European Angst (Paperback)
Herta Muller, Slavoj Zizek, Klaus-Dieter Lehmann
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R622
Discovery Miles 6 220
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Set in Romania at the height of Ceausescu's reign of terror, The
Land of Green Plums tells the story of a group of young students,
each of whom has left the impoverished provinces in search of
better prospects in the city. It is a profound illustration of a
totalitarian state which comes to inhabit every aspect of life; to
the extent that everyone, event the strongest, must either bend to
the oppressors or resist them and perish.
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Nadirs (Paperback)
Herta Muller; Translated by Sieglinde Lug; Afterword by Sieglinde Lug
1
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R436
R357
Discovery Miles 3 570
Save R79 (18%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Juxtaposing reality and fantasy, nightmares and dark laughter,
"Nadirs" is a collection of largely autobiographical stories based
on Herta Muller's childhood in the Romanian countryside. The
individual tales reveal a child's often nightmarish impressions of
life in her village. Seamlessly mixing reality with dream-like
images, they brilliantly convey the inner, troubled life of a child
and at the same time capture the violence and corruption of life
under an oppressive state.
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.
Mit der erstmaligen Herausgabe und Kommentierung der 77 Briefe
Cosima von Bulows (seit 1870 verh. Wagner) an ihre Berliner
Jugendfreundin Ellen Franz (verh. Helene von Heldburg) erschliessen
Maren Goltz und Herta Muller einen bisher unbekannten,
Quellenbestand, der vollig neue Einblicke in die Welt der beiden
fur die Kulturgeschichte so bedeutenden Frauen erlaubt. Obwohl die
Gegenkorrespondenz von Ellen Franz - der Schauspielerin und
spateren Frau des Meininger Theaterherzogs Georg II. - nicht
uberliefert ist, belegen die Briefe aus dem Zeitraum von 1859 bis
1912 nicht nur eine der Forschung bisher verborgen gebliebene
Lebensfreundschaft zwischen der Konigin (Cosima) und dem Taubchen
(Ellen). Sie ermoglichen auch einen differenzierteren Blick auf
Cosimas Gefuhlswelt, ihr Verhaltnis zum Vater Franz Liszt und auf
ihre Ehe mit Hans von Bulow. Vor allem jedoch lassen sie wichtige
Facetten ihrer Personlichkeit sichtbar werden: ihre hohe Bildung,
ihr intellektuelles Niveau und ihre grosse Theaterleidenschaft.
Inspiriert durch das Meininger Hoftheater, pragte Cosima Wagner den
Bayreuther Buhnenstil in entscheidendem Masse mit - vor und nach
dem Tod Richard Wagners. In this first-ever publication of
seventy-seven letters written by Cosima von Bulow (who changed her
name to Cosima Wagner after marrying again in 1870) to her
long-standing Berlin friend Ellen Franz (who after her marriage
became Helene von Heldburg), Maren Goltz and Herta Muller tap an
extremely informative yet previously unknown source of fresh
insights into the worlds of these two women so important in
cultural history. Although the replies from Ellen Franz - an
actress who married theatre aficionado Duke Georg II of
Saxe-Meiningen - have not survived, the letters spanning 1859-1912
do far more than demonstrate the existence of a lifelong friendship
between the 'Queen' (Cosima von Bulow/Wagner) and the 'Chick'
(Ellen Franz) previously unknown to scholars. They also enable a
more nuanced view of Cosima's"
The 2009 Nobel Literature Prize winner. Herta Muller's only
Japanese translation. In Japanese. Distributed by Tsai Fong Books,
Inc.
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