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The Hunger Angel

A Novel

Herta Müller; Translated by Philip Boehm

Picador

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ISBN10: 1250032083
ISBN13: 9781250032089

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304 Pages

$24.00

CA$32.50

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It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke-processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless calculus of hunger that governed the labor colony: one shovel load of coal is worth one gram of bread.

In her new novel, Nobel laureate Herta Müller calls upon her unique combination of poetic intensity and dispassionate precision to conjure the distorted world of the labor camp in all its physical and moral absurdity. She has given Leo the language to express the inexpressible, as hunger sharpens his senses into an acuity that is both hallucinatory and profound. In scene after disorienting scene, the most ordinary objects accrue tender poignancy as they acquire new purpose—a gramophone box serves as a suitcase, a handkerchief becomes a talisman, an enormous piece of casing pipe functions as a lovers' trysting place. The heart is reduced to a pump, the breath mechanized to the rhythm of a swinging shovel, and coal, sand, and snow have a will of their own. Hunger becomes an insatiable angel who haunts the camp, but also a bare-knuckled sparring partner, delivering blows that keep Leo feeling the rawest connection to life.

Müller has distilled Leo's struggle into words of breathtaking intensity that take us on a journey far beyond the Gulag and into the depths of one man's soul.

Reviews

Praise for The Hunger Angel

"A wonderful, passionate, poetic work of literature . . . Herta Müller is a writer who releases great emotional power through a highly sophisticated, image studded, and often expressionistic prose."—Neal Ascherson, The New York Review of Books

"This is not just a good novel, it is a great one . . . Müller is through and through a stylist. Her novel is written in a taut idiomatic German, which breaks into paragraphs of wrenching, Rilkean lyricism . . . A masterpiece."—Financial Times

"Written in terse, hypnotic prose . . . exquisite."—The New Yorker

"The stunning, exhilarating, heartbreaking culmination of Müller's work as a novelist . . . A 300-page prose poem of resistance to totalitarian repression, the book is a haunting paean to the human angel—the inventive, imaginative, invincible force that transcends suffering and absement, that defies depersonalization and deprivation to survive, and even thrive."—The Wichita Eagle

"A work of rare force, a feat of sustained and overpowering poetry . . . Müller has the ability to distil concrete objects into language of the greatest intensity and to sear these objects on to the reader's mind."Times Literary Supplement
"A phenomenal, moving and humbling novel."Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

"Wry and poetic, and Müller's evocative language makes the abstract concrete as her narrator's sanity is stretched . . . Boehm's translation preserves the integrity of Müller's gorgeous prose, and Leo's despondent reveries are at once tragic and engrossing."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

Read an Excerpt

On packing suitcases


All that I have I carry on me.
Or: All that is mine I carry with me.
I carried all I had, but it wasn't mine. Everything either came from someone else or wasn't what it was supposed to be. A gramophone...

About the author

Herta Müller; Translated by Philip Boehm

Herta Müller is the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the European Literature Prize. She is the author of, among other books, The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment. Born in Romania in 1953, Müller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceausescu's secret police. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin.

Herta Müller

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