Currently reading
On freedom of thought
Yes, of course poetic prose can be beyond annoying and pretentious. But when it works, it works.
The Land of Green Plums is dense, blurry, harsh, emotional, intimate and very poetic. It's also effortless, which makes the reading experience even more exciting and disturbing, as I suspect was the writer's original intention. So yes, it works. "tin sheep and wooden watermelons", I felt monitored and a little claustrophobic myself as I was reading this novel.
It's not easy to talk about a book that tells a story of pain, set in Ceaușescu's Romania, where, as we know, horror, abuse and deprivation were taken to another level. But apparently, giving a strong taste of her personal nightmare and a nice punch in the stomach, while singing comes natural to Herta Müller. She is that good.
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