The Appointment

"I've been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp." Thus begins a day in the life of a young factory worker during Ceausescu's totalitarian regime. Her crime? Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. "Marry me," the notes say, with her name and address. As she rides the tram to her interrogation, she thinks over the events and people of her life under terror. In her distraction she misses her stop and finds herself alone on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the interrogation pale in comparison.

Praise

"A slim, masterfully written tale."—Newsweek

 

"A brooding, fog-shrouded allegory of life under the long oppression of the regime of Nicolae

Ceausescu."—The New York Times

 

"Powerful , , , Muller achieves something beautiful. She has wrested poetry from one woman’s desire to remain human in an inhuman system."—Newsday

 

"Müller scatters narrative bombshells across a field of dreams."—San Francisco Chronicle

 

"With terse poetry, Müller brings to life a profoundly moving world . . . the lyrical beauty of the prose and its unflinching moral and emotional honesty carry the reader."—Bookforum

About the Author(s)

Herta Müller

Born in Romania in 1953, Herta Müller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceaucescu's secret police. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin. She has won the IMPAC Award for her novel The Land of Green Plums, and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.

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Excerpt

I’ve been summoned. Thursday, at ten sharp.

Lately I’m being summoned more and more often: ten sharp

on Tuesday, ten sharp on Saturday, on Wednesday, Monday. As

if years were a week, I’m amazed that winter comes so close on

the heels of late summer.

On my way to the tram stop, I again pass the shrubs with the

white berries dangling through the fences.

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