Cristina and Her Double
Herta Müller
[Portobello Books]
In this first collection of essays by Herta Müller, the Nobel laureate returns to her familiar territory, examining the brutality of life under the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu which continues to leave its marks to the present day: ‘The wretchedness of the country can’t be cleared away from one day to the next… The empty corridors are still there, in people’s gazes, visible to everyone, even a foreigner.’ Müller grew up in a German-speaking community in western Romania and her dual status as outsider and insider gives the author her unique perspective.
The duality of language is a theme that comes up again and again in these raw essays. Language is used as a tool for political oppression but also as a tool for subversion and survival. In the GDR’s language prescriptions, she wryly observes, Christmas tree angels were renamed ‘year-end winged creatures’ as communism discouraged religion, while coffins were euphemistically referred to as ‘earth furniture’. It’s this sense of humour that stops the book from coming across as overly gloomy. And if her prose often descends into surrealism, this is because, for Müller, surrealism is sometimes the only way of representing reality. ‘To write,’ she insists, ‘one has to demolish the grandiosity of lived experience, leave that real street and turn it into an invented one, for only the invented one can resemble the real one again.’
Words: Eliza A. Kalfa
