It seems everything around me was exceptionally keen on reminding me of the 20th anniversary of the fall of Berlin Wall, the force of which reunited Germany and marched on to topple the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe almost overnight. It began with the Nobel Prize winning novel, The Land of the Green Plums, which is set in Communist Romania; poetic and Woolfian, it gives an account of the horror under dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. The author Herta Muller is a survivor of the plight, emigrated and exposed the corrupt regime in her writing. Then there’s the mini film festival organized by Goethe Institute, the semi-official German Cultural Centre in the territory. The event features German (what else?) films about the darker episodes in modern history ranging from the rise of Nazism, concentration camps to the Statsi in GDR (secret police in East Germany), all gather together to show you good Germans did and do exist. Audiences are in for a treat to see how simple, ordinary but courageous Germans rebel against the growing turmoils in their country in their own time, or look the scar of history in the eye, brace it, face it. Finally, there’s the 1989 Revolutions series podcast in my iPod. My mind and ears pricked up like an alerted Husky whenever I scrolled to the Berlin Wall playlist. So, Nobel, film fest, podcast – three in a roll. Coincidence or conspiracy? Either way, I relish in it. C’est tout.
Experience tells me – ahem, warns to be honest, that since I’m a sloppy, lazy stock-taker and my memory has the capacity of a walnut and the strength of an 80-year-old lady, I might as well jot down the brilliant quotes from The Land of the Green Plums when halfway through.
Muse on silence, life and death:
When we don’t speak, we become unbearable, and when we do, we make fools of ourselves.
The words in our mouths do as much damage as our feet on the grass. But so do our silences.
I have the feeling that whenever someone dies he leaves behind a sack of words. And barbers, and nail-clippers – I always think of them, too, since the dead no longer need them.
[In] this country, we had to walk, eat, sleep, and love in fear, until it was once again time for the barber and the nail-clippers.
Anyone who makes graveyards just because he walks, eats, sleeps and loves, said Edgar, is a bigger mistake than we are. A mistake of the first order. A master mistake.
These are taken from the opening pages. The narrator is sitting with a man named Edgar. The two are reflecting on the questions of life and death, silence. The reader is fed only bits and pieces of their conversation, it is difficult to tell if it is in fact intermittent or a work of willful selection of the narrator as her own thoughts, monologues intrude here and there. On first reading, one may find it confusing. Likewise, you may, like me, describe it as poetic, mesmerizing – you’ll never get it if you read it like a novel and try to hammer out plot and logic at every line. Feel it, it’s a poem, casually composed.
But by now, having reached one-third of it when I returned to the beginning, I believe I have some sort of bearing. Roll it out then. The narrator is a university student, she lives in a dorm and one of her flatmates hangs herself. Instead of investigating into her death, the school and the government (yes, it has an arm like a serpent, far-reaching and venomous) denounce her and immediately concluded her case. Plagued by curiousity, our heroine/narrator’s begins her own reconstruction of the act. Her quest leads her to other young dissidents, one of whom is Edgar, a poet, equally frustrated by the lies and silences that blanket the country. The second last quote, ‘in this country, we had to walk, eat, sleep and love in fear, until it was once again time for the barber and the nail-clippers’ implies that people led a zombie life under Ceausescu; the essentials and beauties in life were all forbidden and if one failed to suppress the yearn for such which was sure to be the case, one was condemned to eternal fear. ‘Until it was once again time for the barber and nail-clippers’ means one then had to wait for the chance to live, truly live and not merely exist. But the wait was indefinite.
If by now you’re astonished at Ms Muller’s flair to convey the immaculate hopelessness in Communist Romania in just several sentences, wait till you read the sharp accusation she directs to the collaborators – active and silent ones alike. Here we come to the last quote above. Edgar, the poet-idealist, alludes that those who complies with the totalitarian regime simply cos they want to live even it’s only half a life, and so turn innocent people to the State or keep their mouths and eyes shut, are actually digging graveyards for their neighbours. Compared to those who were too shaken to rise up and meekly put up with the dictator; those who’d rather savour the forbidden fruit of life in silence and fear, the graveyard diggers are more repugnant.
I said the novella so far at least is Woolfian cos it reminds me of The Waves which too is heavily crowded with monologues of a bunch of young men and women, involves a suicide in the group. Of course the poetic style, the stubborn refusal to push the plot, too evoke Woolf in my mind. This is a compliment, in case anyone misreads. And I abhor the dramatic use of exclamation mark to rub off any suspicious edge of offence which seems to be the trend of internet writing these days.
