The Land Of Green Plums | Granta

  • Published: 04/02/2010
  • ISBN: 9781847082039
  • Granta Books
  • 256 pages

The Land Of Green Plums

Herta Müller

Translated by Michael Hofmann

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.

A powerful autobiographical account, The Land of Green Plums ... will linger on in the mind and Michael Hofmann's translation is a marvel

Guardian

The Land of Green Plums is a miracle, a fearless human testimony which operates through the combined force of Müller's tight, understated eloquence and Hofmann's deft, atmospheric translation

Irish Times

If W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants suggested there are still new ways of writing about exile and the Holocaust, The Land of Green Plums promises similar possibilities for the literature of the Iron Curtain

Literary Review

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

Michael Hofmann is a poet, translator and critic. His latest book of poems is One Lark, One Horse. He recently translated Jenny Erpenbeck’s novel Kairos.

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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

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‘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.

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Always the Same Snow and Always the Same Uncle

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

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