New Nobel Laureate

Herta Muller has won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature.

She is an ethnic German who was born in 1953 in Romania and spent the firs 34 years of her life there before emigrating to Germany. She is a novelist, short story writer, poet and essayist who now lives in Berlin. The choice of Herta Muller as the winner of the Nobel Prize for literature for the year 2009 came as a surprise to most discerning critics. The odds on favourite this year was Amos Oz from Israel; Philip Roth and Joyce Carol Oates - two distinguished American writers - were also front runners.

Herta Muller is very well known in Germany, and German speaking countries. She has won a number of important German literary awards including the Kafka Prize and the Kleist Prize. However, outside Germany she does not seem to enjoy a wide reputation. In Anglophone countries, she is virtually a closed book. She has published over 20 works, but only a few of her novels have been translated into English. Among them are 'Travels on One Leg', 'The Land of Green Plums', 'The Appointment' and 'The Passport'.

Herta Muller was born in the Nabat region of Romania. She studied literature at the university and later worked as a translator and teacher.

Nicolae Ceausescu was in power in Romania at the time, and all evidence points to the fact that he was a brutal and ruthless dictator. Herta Muller, as a writer, had enormous problems with the Ceausescu regime. She was subject to interrogation and harassment; she found it difficult to publish a work in Romania. The situation became so intolerable that she decided to emigrate to Germany in 1987.

Once, in an interview, she remarked that, 'Writing was a way for me to voice what I could not actively live.'

An important theme that finds forceful expression in Herta Muller's novels is the way that totalitarian societies warp and twist human relationships and curves of feeling. She was deeply disturbed by the totalitarian regime in Romania. Her focus of interest was not so much the structure of the regime as its corrosive impact on the day to day life of ordinary people. She communicated this theme in a prose that is spare and lyrical. In awarding the Nobel Prize to her, the Nobel committee remarked on how with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, she was able to capture the landscape of the dispossessed.

In her novel 'The Appointment', the unnamed narrator rides a tram to keep an appointment with the secret police who will interrogate her mercilessly. Her interrogator is Major Albu. What is interesting about these interrogations is that they do not take place according to a regular plan; she is summoned whenever Major Albu is in a mood for this interchange. This creates a sense of unbearable anxiety in the narrator. She is uncertain on which day she will be summoned, and when she would be incarcerated. Her ride on the tram generates various uncomfortable memories and the plot is advanced through the intermingling of her memories and desires and ruminations. The oppressiveness of the atmosphere is such that she hesitates to trust anyone.

Her novel, 'The Land of Green Plums', also calls attention to the complex ways in which the brutalities of the state in totalitarian societies have a devastating impact on the day to day lives of ordinary citizens.

Here, a young woman who is harassed and vilified takes her life, and her roommate tells the story. 'The Passport' narrates the experience of a German-Romanian miller who seeks official approval for emigrating to West Germany.

Herta Muller dramatizes the problems of displacement encountered by freedom-loving citizens in totalitarian societies, minority ethnic groups and exiles. She is deeply interested in exploring the meaning of contemporary history with poetic exactitude in the way that Gunadasa Amarasekera has done in his octalogy of novels. She points out not only how terror encircles the powerlessness of the ruled but also their superfluousness. Her founding and shaping conviction is that a writer should strive for freedom and its corollary, unobtrusive government, plurality and the joy of experimentation.

It is her belief that goals of creativity are best met by an unflinching engagement with history. Her precise prose stands in sharp contrast to the mystifications of language put into circulation in totalitarian societies.

Herta Muller, to be sure, has a share of critics. Some find her range too narrow; some are repelled by her bleak vision. Then there are those who complain that her plots are convoluted and lack direction.

However that may be, one thing is certain. More and more of Herta Muller's works will be translated into English in the months to come.