Hellen

I looked forward to reading this book. Usually I enjoy poetic, (partially) biographical kinds of books with a stream-of-conscious kind of writing. I can't help but feel that something got lost in translation. It could somehow easily imagine this being a great book in its original language, but at least this translation didn't work for me.

This story is like one of those images that, upon closer inspection, consist of a thousand smaller pictures. When you look at it from a distance, the big picture appears. The big picture in this case is the totalitarianism under Ceausescu. The small pictures are snapshots from the past and present (in no particular order) of the unnamed narrator. On one page we find a description of her grandmother cutting her nails with the garden clippers, on the other she gets interrogated and humiliated, all in short, simple sentences.

In the end the big picture didn't feel as sharply projected as it could have been, perhaps because of the translation. I'll be reading more from Herta Müller, but next time in the original language.