The Passport (Masks) |
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Editorial Review / Publisher's Information:
Product Description
From the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature! “[The Passport] has the same clipped prose cadences as Nadirs, this time applied to evoke the trapped mentality of a man so desperate for freedom that he views everything through a temporal lens, like a prisoner staring at a calendar in his cell.â€â€”Wall Street Journal “A swift, stinging narrative, fable-like in its stoic concision and painterly detail.â€â€”The Philadelphia Inquirer The Passport is a beautiful, haunting novel whose subject is a German village in Romania caught between the stifling hopelessness of Ceausescu’s dictatorship and the glittering temptations of the West. Stories from the past are woven together with the problems Windisch, the village miller, faces after he applies for permission to migrate to West Germany. Herta Müller (Herta Mueller) describes with poetic attention the dreams and superstitions, conflicts and oppression of a forgotten region, the Banat, in the Danube Plain. In sparse, poetic language, Muller captures the forlorn plight of a trapped people.
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Customer Reviews:
• A Stark Glimpse Into A Bleak Time And Place
15 December, 2009
The first thing that struck me about Herta Muller's 1986 work The Passport was to wonder how good the translation would be considering the actual German title (Man is a Great Pheasant in the World) was ignored for a much simpler, but weaker title. I hoped it was just done for the usual American marketing purposes (simpler is better, don't use metaphor when you can use a concrete noun) and plugged ahead, but wondered throughout the book.
`The Pheasant' is essentially a prose poem, with staccato narrative, both in sentence structure as well as chapter organization. Another reviewer has compared it to expressionist painting, and I would agree. I found reading it very irritating at first, but eventually eased into it. Paradoxically, the simpler the prose here the harder it is to grasp at first. Like a poem, the words must be reflected upon, and often re-read, to gather the intent. The short chapters helped me along with that. They worked like film exposures into the lives of these characters, and had a cumulative effect until at the end I loved the book.
The story itself is bleak. It's set in a small village in Ceausescu-era Romania. The protagonist is Windisch, the village miller, who is trying to get passports to take his family to West Germany. He's bringing free flour to the town's mayor, who keeps promising him a passport in return, but it never materializes. As Muller shows us in sometimes surreal glimpses into the town's history and present, we learn how trapped these people are and what it will really take for Windisch to get the passports. We learn of a place where honor and dignity took a back-seat to freedom and the necessity to escape.
This is the first Muller book I've read and I will definitely be checking out others.
- Amazon Customer Review
• The Passport By Herta Muller
07 January, 2010
Here is another Muller book on the quotidian brutality of life under the Ceacescu regime. It is the prominent theme of her overall ouevre, and here is explored in as great of detail as any of her other books. The plot, like the book itself, is thin; Windisch seeks to exit his tiny Romanian village and has to go through the corrupt government to secure a passport, at great risk and cost, to do so. The plot isn't half as interesting as the way Muller chooses to tell the story. The book is presented in a series of tiny vignettes that each in their own way shed some light on how people lived, thought, rationalized and reacted in such a dehumanizing world. Some further the plot, some reveal character, and some are presented as-is in order to make the story seem as everyday and true to life as possible. It is a fine and necessary book, and subtly educates the reader about a period of time not as covered as it should be. It is still a chore to wade through, however, and this could be due to Muller's writing abilities or a shoddy translation which created some chunky prose. This isn't a pretty read, but anyone interested in Muller's work after her sudden post-Nobel fame would benefit by experiencing it.
- Amazon Customer Review
• Slow But Interesting Depiction Of Life In Romania For German Speaking Minority
18 January, 2010
The grey, oppressive life of a rural village in Romania, populated by the German-speaking minority, during the Ceausescu regime. The protagonist is Windisch, the village miller, a middle aged man who lives with his wife and a teenage daughter, and wants to leave Romania for Germany. In order to do that, he needs a passport, and in order to get one he needs to bribe various officials, including the mayor of the small town. Written in 1986 by last year's winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the German-speaking Romanian-born novelist Herta Muller, it is structured in small chapters, in which not very much happens, just the petty jealousies among the various characters (there is not a single person in the book that is really likable). While the prose is not difficult, the oppressiveness, small-mindedness and dullness of the situations requires a patient reader, but it is a rewarding book (and is not very long).
- Amazon Customer Review
• The Passport (masks)
05 February, 2010
In //The Passport//, Windisch, the miller in a German village in a small Romanian town, yearns to leave his troubled home for West Germany, and he undertakes to obtain a passport. Such a goal is none too easy a task, however, and to reach his goal he must submit to a series of indignities that unseat his perception of what it means to be a man, and a father. Set against the bleak landscape of Ceausescu's dictatorship, the novel chronicles the trials faced by those people for whom escape--and freedom--is a tantalizingly close but ultimately distant dream.
Muller, who won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature, is largely unknown in the United States, and //The Passport//, the first of her novels to be translated into English, is a stunning introduction to her jewel-like prose, hard and clear as a diamond. Her short sentences--"The floor slopes. The floor rises. It rises high against the wall."--eerily flatten objects and landscape, people and animals, into a dreary, hopeless tableau where humanity and compassion, if they are to be found at all, are painfully elusive.
Reviewed by Margo Orlando Littell
- Amazon Customer Review
• "a Man Is Nothing But A Pheasant In The World"
31 January, 2010
That is the title of Herta Müller's 1986 novella in German, the language in which it was written. Whatever possessed those behind the publication of this English translation to change the title to THE PASSPORT? I suppose those boors would want to publish "À la recherche du temps perdu" with a title like "The Aesthete".
Early in the novella, the protagonist Windisch is in the midst of stealing another two sacks of flour to bribe the mayor so that Windisch might eventually receive the passport necessary to escape the grim and stultified Romania of Nicolae Ceausescu. The indifferent night watchman, who does not share Windisch's dream of escape, phlegmatically observes, "A man is nothing but a pheasant in the world." Windisch, still harboring some hope, replies "A man is strong, stronger than the beasts."
Months and countless sacks of flour later, the mayor still has not come through with the passport and Windisch is even more beaten down by his life in Romania. The price for getting passports for himself, his wife, and his daughter now apparently includes letting his daughter submit herself to the local priest and militiaman for their sexual predations. Windisch has become thoroughly disabused of the notion that a man is strong, stronger than the beasts. Instead,
"Windisch puts his elbows on the table. His hands are heavy. Windisch puts his face in his heavy hands. * * * Windisch feels the blow. A stone hangs in his ribs. * * * With naked eyes and with the stone in his ribs, Windisch says loudly: `A man is nothing but a pheasant in the world.'"
That excerpt is typical of the prose throughout THE PASSPORT: the sentences are but shards, sharp and stark and severe. They certainly fit the bleak world of 1980's Romania. In many places, the narrative takes surreal turns, so that the novella seemingly consists of one Dali painting after another. At first, I was annoyed with the weird scenes; they bordered on the pretentious. But they never take over the story, and with just a little effort I could follow the narrative in its more realistic mode. By the end, I was able to accept the bizarre and surreal as emblematic of the large dose of unreality and disconnectedness of life in Ceausescu's Romania.
THE PASSPORT is not great literature, but it is literature nonetheless. Written relatively early in Muller's career, it evinces promise of greater works, perhaps even a body of work worthy of a Nobel Prize. She of course received the Nobel, and, based on THE PASSPORT, I look forward to exploring her later work and learning why. Four-and-a-half stars, rounded up.
- Amazon Customer Review
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