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2009 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, Herta Müller, has written a stunning, haunting novel about suffering and survival in the Soviet work camps following World War II. The end of the war is fast approaching when 17 year-old Leo Auberg, a young, closeted gay man of German descent is deported from his small Romanian town to a Soviet labour camp. He carries with him his father's overcoat, a suitcase fashioned from a gramophone box, his aunt's green woollen gloves and these words from his grandmother : ''I know you'll come back.''
For 5 long back-breaking years, Leo is freezing cold, overworked and underfed, and always at the mercy of the Hunger Angel', the personification of the constant and gnawing torment of hunger and a deeper metaphysical need. In spare yet lyrical prose, Müller dramatizes the constant struggle that Leo and the other indentured workers face as they are tempted and taunted by their individual hunger angels, and how they struggle to maintain their sanity and humanity in the midst of the harshness of the camp.
Having already found the joys of sex in secluded wooded areas or empty bath house saunas in his youth, he already knows what it feels like to be hemmed in and imprisoned by the laws and narrow morality of his home town, but life in the prison camp is far more isolating and dangerous. This is a powerful novel about the human spirit and its will to survive amid utter depravity and human oppression, told in an unsparing and unsentimental manner.
Paperback, 304 Pages, Orig. Publ. 2012, This Ed. Publ. 2013
Author: Herta Muller