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Possesses a narrative patterning that is strikingly beautiful. There's compression, too, and suspense, though it's not a mystery or thriller. It's character driven so there's no real plot. Yet the vivid picture Herta Müller paints of Communist Romania under dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu is an absolute horror. I mean, the inanity of harassing perfectly harmless people and interrogating them and humiliating them for no purpose other than to instill fear and, thus, submission. Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil" springs to mind. Herta Müller has taken a hideous thing and made transcendent art from it. A captivating stunner of a novel but dark, dark.