Herta Müller Come-Down

Not often one comes across an author of stature who is almost repellent. One short book makes it difficult to judge, but in the example of Nobel winner Herta Müller’s “The Passport”—Der Mensch ist ein Fasan auf der Wels—it is not saying too much.

            The rude provincials of the Banat in Romania that people this book seem to draw Müller’s contempt. One thinks of Naipaul’s condescension for the benighted Indians of the Sub-continent, the Caribbean and others elsewhere caught on what is conceived as the wrong side of history and the march of civilization. Certainly Müller seems to have no real interest in these people, they are cardboard sketches of figures in narrow life-stations marooned in a nondescript backwater behind the Iron Curtain. After the vitality and startlingly insightful voices of Svetlana Alexievich’s witnesses the contrast could not be stronger.

            At the mid-point of the novel the tavern scene carried echoes of The Wasteland, without anything of Eliot’s partial musical mitigation.

            Reading currently in the midst of the desperate waves of refugees too at all points of the global compass the focus on a father’s selling of his daughter for a passport seems wrongheaded and complacent condemnation.

            Reading in the midst of all the trafficking of women in Singapore and the wider region contempt at any level seems misguided. The profit motive, greed and exploitation in the era of Trump’s super models certainly calls for another kind of attention. (Published in the Reagan/Thatcher era gives context.)

            In Indonesia fathers’ offering their daughters for short-term marriages of a month is reportedly still to be found in areas where the new affluence has not reached. A young Sumatran from outlying Lampung told a couple of weeks ago of daily such hire in her region.

            Eventually a short chapter putting the “prostitution” in some perspective arrived in the treatment of the main character Windisch’s wife recalling her entrapment in Russia during the war.

            The poetry of Müller’s narrative cited as a feature by the Nobel Committee seemed almost entirely absent to this reader, at least in translation. (Martin Chalmers, Serpent’s Tail.)

NB. “The Hunger Angel” is perhaps Mueller’s high achievement, found by chance in a Melb thrift shop 2 years later and devoured sentence by sentence.