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It is terrible that I'm giving this only three stars, but I cannot say that I "really liked it" mostly because it was so difficult to read and comprehend. The book is about trauma told through the character Irene, a thirtysomething woman who can only perceive the world in fragments, dissolution, and dissociation. Thank goodness for my literature professor and his help in walking us through this book. There is a minimal plot if you hunt for it, about Irene moving out of Romania and to West Berlin. There she finds herself not only suffering from the trauma she experienced in Romania, but unable to form meaningful connections, even with the three men with whom she obliquely forms relationships.

The text is more poetry than prose, and it requires close reading and working through what a mind like Irene's might mean by her fragmented observations and figurative language. Her existence is in a present through which the past often intrudes. Sometimes she seems to observe someone that may not really be there, who may instead be a stand-in for herself, a self she also cannot seem to forge a connection with. Surreal images, imagination, and dreams also intrude into her fragmented reality.

There is no question that this book is depressing. Irene is a character who has suffered terribly. There are, I think, some brief glimpses of hope, but by design the effect of this book on the reader is one of disorientation, an attempt to get the reader to better understand how someone like Irene processes the world. For that, it is no wonder Herta Muller won the Nobel Prize in Literature; she truly tapped into a different way of telling a narrative, of providing point of view, of exploring the inner psyche of traumatized people. For that this is a book to value and to respect. This approach, however, doesn't make the experience all that pleasant. Instead, it reminds us that there are stories to be told that are not pleasant, by people damaged by fascism and violence, isolation and alienation, with little hope for their full recovery.