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So, I started reading this book and it was just one of those One Day in the Life of …� kind of Russian Gulag books, and not much of one, really, as these things go, although it promised to be different because Leo Auberg is Transylvanian, a German transplant if you will. As if Stalin needs a reason. Leo is seventeen, and gay, but that’s not why he’s packed away. His bathhouse urges are just flecks of character. If they knew he was gay, he would have gone to a different camp, a shorter stay, and no return.

He wasn’t much of a rabble-rouser; and too doughy to be a German soldier. His parents, who believed in the black square of Hitler’s mustache got to stay. Somehow, only Leo was on the List. He packed and went, packed and went, carrying silent baggage.

So here he is, where his constant companion is The Hunger Angel.*

But then I took the book to breakfast. There, amid the bustle of morning souls, I read this:

From all around the mess hall came the clatter of tin. Every spoonful is a tin kiss, I thought. And every one of us is ruled by our hunger, as though by an alien power. But no matter how well I knew that in the moment, I forgot it right away.**

Did the translator err? While it can be grammatically correct for every one of us to be ruled by our hunger, that's only so when it's a collective hunger. Leo's hunger is very personal, instead.

This is what they mean, I think, when they give Müller prizes, and say she speaks of identity and displacement, of the dispossessed.

This book talks about Hunger, yes, but not a whiny Hamsun hunger. Sometimes the hunger is Homesickness, but a more profound version - not just missing home, but not being allowed to be home. The impossibility of Home.

In the camp we had lice on our heads, in our eyebrows, on our necks, in our armpits, and in our pubic hair. We had bedbugs in our bunks. We were hungry. But we didn't say: I have lice or bedbugs or I'm hungry. We said: I'm homesick. Which was the last thing we needed.

Oh, you say, maybe the translator got it right, speaking to the universal.

It may be that I'm the old gap-toothed man in the upper-left corner of a wedding photo that doesn't exist, and simultaneously a skinny child in a schoolyard that also doesn't exist.

Leo gets out of camp, out of his arbitrary five-year sentence. He comes home, but is still homesick. He left his Hunger Angel in the camp, but is still hungry. He gets married, but he still goes to the park.

This book is about nothing less than the human soul. Some souls wind up face down in a mortar pit; some souls watch a cuckoo clock, even when the cuckoo is stolen; some souls get theirs, in a culvert, a mouth gagged with a tie, an axe, having done its work, left on the chest; some souls survive.

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*The German title, Atemschaukel, is a compound word Müller made up - she does that - that is difficult to translate, meaning something like "breath-swing", according to our translator. I tried to imagine the book with "breath-swing" in place of "Hunger Angel" in each instance, but failed. Although, from a distance, the point of the book, as I understand it, makes more sense for me as "breath-swing".***

**I'll have the eggs over easy, black coffee, and a moment of clarity, please.

***Yes, I'm footnoting my footnotes. And not only to annoy those that are easily annoyed by annotations on the same page. This book was intended to be a collaboration by Müller and Oskar Pastior, a Romanian-born German poet who was deported to a Soviet camp, much like the protagonist of this novel. Pastior died in 2006 and Müller imagined and wrote the book on her own, although crediting Pastior for his reminiscences. I bring this up, as a public service, because Pastior was the only German member of Oulipo, a mostly French group or artists who believe in the seeking of new structures and patterns which may be used by writers in any way they enjoy. I know some Goodreaders who are having an Oulipo phase in their reading; and Müller, here, may be paying homage.