THE LAND OF GREEN PLUMS

Set in Romania at the height of Ceausescu's reign of terror, The Land of Green Plums tells the story of a group of young students, each of whom has left the impoverished provinces for the city in search of better prospects. Any hope they may have had for themselves and their future is dashed because the city, no less than the countryside, bears the mark of the dictatorship's corrosive touch. In turn, each of the narrator's friends betrays her, commits suicide or both. As they do so we see the way that the totalitarian state comes to inhabit every aspect of life and how everyone, even the strongest, must either bend to the oppressors or resist them and thereby perish. Herta Muller, herself a survivor of Ceausescu's police state, speaks from intimate experience. Scene by scene, in language at once harsh and poetic, she constructs a devastating picture of a society and a generation ruined by fear. In startling images of unsettling power: policemen filling their pockets and mouths with green plums; slaughterhouse workers drinking fresh cow's blood; a docile proletariat making things no one wants - `tin sheep and wooden watermelons' - Muller anatomizes a country and its citizens, and the corruption that has rotted the core of both.