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Writing and Surviving Ceausescu's Romania
by Herta Müller
A Nobel laureate presents a brilliant, discomfiting reflection on literary life defined by the brutality of Ceausescu's Romania.
From her childhood in Romania, in a village "as small as a thimble on the edge of the world," through to life in exile in Germany, Herta Müller's story unspools against the tumultuous history of Romania in the latter half of the twentieth century. Here, the Nobel Prize laureate reflects on cultural history, memory, and trauma, and on what it was to live and write under Ceausescu's regime. She revisits the friendships that buckled under the weight of fear and paranoia; the experience of being surveilled and interrogated; and on the unique blend of fear and tedium borne through life under totalitarianism.
The Village on the Edge of the World is a book that chronicles the minutiae of life under both fascism and the Soviet Union, while charting the existential questions posed by these regimes of the twentieth century—and how they remain with us in the twenty-first. This is a powerful and evocative reflection on life behind the Iron Curtain.
"The reader is left with a solemn wonder at the singularly meticulous power of Müller's imagination and her inimitable, granular reverence for language. A riveting account, with bittersweet, lyrical, and hard-won wisdom packed onto every page." ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
This information about The Village on the Edge of the World was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Herta Müller was born on August 17, 1953 in Banat, Romania. In 1987, she emigrated to Germany and has lived in Berlin ever since. She is the author of The Land of Green Plums, The Appointment, The Hunger Angel, and The Fox Was Ever the Hunter, among other works. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.
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