Korean Title: Soom Geune
Author: Herta Müller
Translator: Kyung-hee Park
Publisher: Munhakdongne
Hardcover | 352 pages | 203*137mm
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| >>>This book is written in Korean. |
About This Book
'I know you'll come back'. These are the words the grandmother of
seventeen-year-old Leopold Auberg says to him the night he is collected
by Russian soldiers for deportation to a labour camp in the Ukraine.
From the very first page of this compelling new novel it becomes clear
that Muller is an author who wields an extraordinary power over words.
Equally astonishing is her convincing handling of such a serious
subject: extensive research and collaboration with the late
Romanian-German poet Oskar Pastior about his experiences in the Gulag
have given this work a life force of its own.
As the reader joins the young narrator his family are helping him pack
his few belongings together into an old gramophone case, trying to
overcome their fear and helplessness at his departure. He is herded onto
a cattle train with other camp internees and undergoes the gruelling and
exhausting journey to the Gulag. Once in the camp, the stereotypical
issues the reader may expect to be confronted with are barely mentioned,
here the focus is on the smaller ? and at first glance insignificant ?
details which threaten the internees¡¯ dignity and emphasise the control
they have lost over their lives. Most startling is the way in which the
author subverts the reader¡¯s conceptions of what would be imagined to be
the worst elements, such as the unrelenting hunger which consumes
Leopold: ultimately this is what keeps him alive, acting as his
connection with the world. When they are released from the camp the
reader expects elation, but instead they are frightened: despite its
harsh and bleak conditions the camp has become their world, its walls
their safety, its oppressions their routines.
This is truly a remarkable novel. The language is poetic and masterful,
but also joyous in its simplicity and imagery: a young woman in the camp
-- who had been discovered through the footprints outside her hideaway
back home -- claims that she will never forgive the snow. Every other
substance would have swallowed the evidence of her existence -- water,
sand, dirt -- but the freshly fallen snow can never be a silent
accomplice. Muller has a highly individual voice, and this novel, which
also shines a light on a fascinating but still neglected aspect of
German history, deserves to be brought to the attention of an
international readership.
Author, Herta Müller, received Nobel Literature Award in 2010.
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