The Appointment | Granta

  • Published: 07/07/2011
  • ISBN: 9781846273766
  • 129x20mm
  • 224 pages

The Appointment

Herta Müller

Translated by Michael Hulse, Philip Boehm

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.

A brooding, fog-shrouded allegory of life under the long oppression of the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu.

New York Times

Nobody since Arthur Koestler in the 1940s has written more intelligently or with such subtle precision about life under totalitarianism ... Müller has an exceptionally rare talent - to turn the terrifying, the distorted and the hideously ugly into something uplifting and beautiful

Prospect

Herta Muller is a passionate artist of protest.

Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

The Author

Herta Müller was born on 17 August 1953 in Nitzkydorf (Banat/Romania). Her parents belonged to the German-speaking minority. Her father was a lorry driver, her mother a peasant. She attended school and university in Temeswar. After refusing to work for the Romanian secret service, the Securitate, she lost her job as translator in a machine factory. Nadirs, her first book, lay around at the publishers for four years and was heavily censored when it was eventually published. The manuscript was smuggled to Germany and published in 1984. In 1987, she emigrated to Germany and has lived in Berlin ever since. She has a string of literary prizes to her name, including the Aspekte Literature Prize (1984), the Kleist Prize (1994), the Prix Aristeion (1995), the Konrad Adenauer prize for literature (2004) and, the Nobel Prize for Literature (2009).

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The Translator

Philip Boehm has translated numerous works from German and Polish by authors including Herta Müller, Franz Kafka, and Stefan Chwin. For the theater he has written plays such as Mixtitlan, The Death of Atahualpa, and Return of the Bedbug. He has received awards from the American Translators Association, the U.K. Society of Authors, the NEA, PEN America, the Austrian Ministry of Culture, the Mexican-American Fund for Culture, and the Texas Institute of Letters. He lives in St. Louis, where he is the artistic director of Upstream Theater.

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From the Same Author

Herta Müller on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

Words in the Head and Words in the Sentence

Herta Müller

‘During an interrogation speech glows hot in the mouth, and what is spoken freezes.’

Herta Müller on language. Translated from the German by Philip Boehm.

Fiction | Granta 125

Always the Same Snow and Always the Same Uncle

Herta Müller

‘Who knows: what I write I must eat, what I don’t write – eats me.’

Fiction | Granta 134

The Way of the Apple Worm

Herta Müller

‘The mother of the needle is the place that bleeds.’