Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

In each of her books Herta Müller succeeds in creating a very ingenious world, with its own language and idiom that illustrates the traumatic effect of what her main characters have to undergo. Also in this case, the experiences of a 17 year old Romanian German, which at the beginning of 1945 is arrested by the Soviets and transported to a camp, deep in Russia (or Ukraine), to do forced labour. The boy describes his experiences in short chapters, and they are absolutely shocking.

But it aren’t plain observations, Müller describes them with a huge sense of the psychological complexity of people who are driven to the margin of what’s liveable. In this her work does not differ very much of what Primo Levi did Survival in Auschwitz: wondering what a human is, in the middle of the most extreme inhumane. But Müller adds a linguistic layer to it: her character brings his trauma in a poetic-fantastic-horribly distorted language as with the handsome description of the "Hunger angel" who constantly pops up, or the "breath-swinging" movement in shoveling cement or coal; this magical-realistic language is clearly a means to survive.

All this is handsome, clever and gripping, surely if you reread it a number of times. But again I have to confess (this is already the 3rd book of Müller I read) that it really didn’t captivate me, I don't really like it, it's just too strange. Maybe I don’t have the stomach for it?!