Set in Romania at the height of Ceauescu's reign of terror, The Land of
Green Plums tells the story of a group of young people who leave the
impoverished province for the city in search of better prospects and
camaraderie. But their hopes are ravaged, because the city, no less than
the countryside, bears everywhere the mark of the dictatorship's
corrosive touch. All the narrator's friends--teachers and students of
vaguely dissident allegiance--betray her, do away with themselves, or
both. As they do so, we see the way the totalitarian state comes to
inhabit every human realm and how everyone, even the strongest, must
either bend to the oppressors or resist them and thereby perish.
Herta Müller, herself a survivor of Ceausescu's police state, speaks
from intimate experience. Scene by scene, in language at once harsh and
poetic, she constructs a devastating picture of a society and a
generation ruined by fear. In simple images of hieroglyphic
power--policeman filling their pockets and mouths with green plums;
girls sleeping with abattoir workers for bags of offal; a docile
proletariat making things no one wants--"tin sheep and wooden
watermelons"--Müller anatomizes a country and its citizens and the
corruption that has rotted the core of both.
