Description

A masterful new novel from the success of this year's Nobel Prize, praised for showing the "scenery of the dispossessed" with "the focus of composition and the frankness of writing" (Nobel Prize Board)It had been an icy day in January 1945 once the patrol arrived for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo might devote the following five decades in a coke handling plant, shoveling coal, hauling stones, mixing mortar, and fighting the persistent calculus of starvation that ruled the labor nest: one spade load of coal may be worth one g of bread.In her new book, Nobel laureate Herta Müller calls upon her distinctive mixture of graceful strength and dispassionate accuracy to create the altered world of the labor camp in most its actual and moral absurdity. She's provided Leo the vocabulary as his senses are sharpened by hunger into a skill that's serious and equally hallucinatory, to state the inexpressible. In scene after scene, tender poignancy is accrued by the most ordinary objects because they obtain new purpose—a gramophone container acts as a baggage, a handkerchief becomes a talisman, a massive bit like a fans' trysting spot of covering tube capabilities.