Ms. Müller in this concise, spare work describes in the most tactile terms what totalitarianism meant for the individual and his interior, mental life ... Critical both as a work of art and as a firsthand document.
Superb ... Comprehensive ... Conducted by Müller’s editor, Angelika Klammer, and skilfully translated by Kate McNaughton, these interviews trace a compelling trajectory. I was rapt, following a child who eats mouldy plums and plants, has laughing fits and feels desperate to belong, watching her grow into a defiant and resilient woman determined to break free.
What emerges in her memoir is the complex relationship between two realities ... Thinking, Müller concludes, must then be ‘an actual place,’ perhaps an ‘overly long street’ or an ‘unfamiliar room’. But the village as small as a thimble on the edge of the world is not a place for just any thinking; it is a place where thinking must do gymnastics. We cannot escape the image of Müller looking back on her village, both as a child standing in the fields and an adult casting her eye East, in this memoir. She is thinking where she shouldn’t; she is thinking where she must.
Nobel laureate Müller (The Fox Was Ever the Hunter, 2016) narrates her life’s trajectory, personal resilience, and literary calling forged by her childhood in totalitarian Romania ... Intimate.
Traces the unnerving strangeness of Müller’s life under Ceaușescu’s totalitarian rule ... Müller looks back with a dim, pessimistic view, but there is still beauty, profound insight, and occasional humor ... An excellent addition to any memoir collection.
Striking ... Müller offers fascinating if horrible glimpses of the hostility she faced and the different ways the regime tried to crush her ... A good biographical introduction to Müller and her work. While much of her life does not come up, what she does talk about makes for a sometimes searing portrait -- and certainly gives a very good impression of the obscenity of the Ceaușescu regime.
The reader is left with a solemn wonder at the singularly meticulous power of Müller’s imagination and her inimitable, granular reverence for language ... A riveting account, with bittersweet, lyrical, and hard-won wisdom packed onto every page.
