The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

"For Müller, the longevity of things is a fascination of great urgency. In The Fox Was Ever the Hunter, her latest work to be published in English, this concern takes on an encyclopedic, yet characteristically poetic, bent. Set during the final months of Ceausescu’s rule, the novel, deftly rendered by Müller’s longtime translator Philip Boehm, tells the story of two close friends, Adina and Clara, their alternate survival methods in the regime and the things that separate their fates . . . Literature is often at its best, and most urgent, when it is a survival tactic. In her writing, Müller inches closer to narrowing the gap between people and things, between life and language. For that reason, her sparse prose often resembles poetry . . . Originally published in her native German in 1992, The Fox Was Ever the Hunter is a haunting portrayal of the secret lives of people and things during the last breaths of an obliterating regime."—Linda Kinstler, The Washington Post

"The Fox Was Ever the Hunter is itself a collage of images, stories and fragments of forbidden songs. Müller arranges them in such a way that the reader gets a sense of how terrifying and rife with betrayal life in Romania was during the end of ­Ceausescu’s regime . . . The reader understands that each and every one of Müller’s stories, every flight of luscious language and every brutal fact, has been necessary in depicting a society torn to pieces and tasked, with the curtains finally open and the light streaming in, with putting those pieces back together to make sense of it all."—Vendela Vida, The New York Times Book Review

"An air of Soviet-era menace engulfs The Fox Was Ever the Hunter, Herta Müller's remarkable novel—newly released in English and given a lucid translation by Philip Boehm . . . The Fox,published originally in German in 1992, is one of Müller's early works, and it draws on what she suffered while clenched in the jaws of one of history's most notorious dictatorships. But she infuses characters and events with surreal elements and heightened levels of metaphor that make this much more than a roman à clef . . . Her images come at us with a stark brutality; outside the town sheep graze, so famished by the end of summer that they 'lick the walls' of a slaughterhouse."—Jean Zimmerman, NPR

“Müller slowly builds suspense as she draws on memories of the stark landscape, the personal betrayals, the state brutality, the daily dread and tedium. Her prose—as poetic as it is blunt—works like a prism, shattering and illuminating a world that is always watching, waiting.”—Ann Hulbert, The Atlantic

“Perhaps no author has captured the surreal textures of Iron Curtain paranoia quite like Herta Müller.”—Vogue (Best Books of the Month)

“This newly translated 1992 novel set during the twilight of Romania’s Ceausescu regime makes vivid the persecution Müller and others suffered . . . She uses the distinctive language honoured by the Nobel Committee for its ‘concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose’ to give a powerful sense of the toxic atmosphere of a totalitarian regime.”—BBC Culture

“Atmospheric, lyrical . . . An essential work of post-Iron Curtain literature and a harrowing portrait of life under suspicion.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Offers a bleak and poetic portrait of Romanian village life in the final days of the Ceausescu regime, where deprivation is ubiquitous, cruelty is standard, and spying is a survival skill . . . Thickly lyrical and sometimes downright hallucinatory . . . few descriptions of life under totalitarian rule are as beautifully evocative.”—Booklist (starred review)