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The Land of Green Plums is Herta Muller’s kafkaesk tale of life in Romania under the dictator, Ceaușescu. When the story opens, our narrator is one of five college students of German heritage, and almost immediately she becomes one of only four.

The first 25-30 pages of the book are almost dreamlike. It is difficult to piece together what is going on, but as the story progresses it begins to take shape, and I began to see that the narrator withholds details because she is afraid to say too much. Fear is the overpowering emotion in life, not only for these students, but for everyone around them.

On the first page, she says,

To this day, I can’t really picture a grave. Only a belt, a window, a nut and a rope. To me, each death is like a sack.

This makes little sense in the beginning, it encapsulates everything by the end.

This is totalitarianism at its zenith. No individuality is allowed, no disagreement, so that when a vote is called for there is no dissent, all hands go up and stay up until people are told to put them down.

Only the demented would not have raised their hands in the great hall. They had exchanged fear for insanity.

The writing is expressive and fearful and poetic. Yes, poetic, for Muller is a poet and that shows up in the lyrical way in which she presents even the most horrible of scenes.

All the others were fast asleep. Between my head and the pillow, I heard the dry objects of the mad people rustling: the withered bouquet of the waiting man, the grass pigtail of the dwarf lady, the newspaper hat of the old sled woman, the philosopher’s white beard.

As I was reading, I thought of Kafka’s The Trial. I felt that same sense of resignation to the omniscient authority of the state. One could never know when or why or how, but one could be sure of eventually being caught up in the web into which people disappeared like flies wrapped by spiders.

Even though we all know the true end of the story–Ceausescu executed and Romania emerging from 42 years of Communist rule–the reality of what these people endured is the thing nightmares are made of. I believe I would rather have known Dracula.