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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
May 2016, 256 pages
Paperback:
May 2017, 256 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Davida Chazan
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An early masterpiece from the winner of the Nobel Prize hailed as the laureate of life under totalitarianism.
Romania - the last months of the Ceausescu regime. Adina is a young schoolteacher. Paul is a musician. Clara works in a wire factory. Pavel is Clara's lover. But one of them works for the secret police and is reporting on all of the group.
One day Adina returns home to discover that her fox fur rug has had its tail cut off. On another occasion it's the hindleg. Then a foreleg. The mutilated fur is a sign that she is being tracked by the secret police - the fox was ever the hunter.
Images of photographic precision combine into a kaleidoscope of terror as Adina and her friends struggle to keep mind and body intact in a world pervaded by complicity and permeated with fear, where it's hard to tell victim from perpetrator.
In The Fox Was Always a Hunter, Herta Müller once again uses language that displays the "concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose" - as the Swedish Academy noted upon awarding her the Nobel Prize - to create a hauntingly cinematic portrayal of the corruption of the soul under totalitarianism.
The way of the apple worm
The ant is carrying a dead fly three times its size. The ant can't see the way ahead, it flips the fly around and crawls back. Adina doesn't want to block the ant's path so she pulls in her elbow. A clump of tar next to her knee glistens as it seethes in the sun. Adina dabs at the tar with her finger, raising a thin thread that stiffens in the air before it snaps.
The ant has the head of a pin, the sun can't find any place to burn. The sun stings. The ant loses its way. It crawls but is not alive, the human eye does not consider it an animal. The spike heads of the grasses on the outskirts of town crawl the same way. The fly is alive because it's three times the size of the ant and because it's being carried, the human eye does consider the fly an animal.
Clara is blinded by the blazing pumpkin of the sun and doesn't see the fly. She sits with her legs apart and rests her hands between her knees. Pubic hair shows where her ...
Admittedly, this is not going to be a book that everyone is going to love, and, in fact, I'm sure that many will hate it. However, I hope that those who do read it to the end will realize, as I did, that The Fox Was Ever the Hunter is much more than a bunch of poetic vignettes strung together against the background of communist Romania. There are subtleties here that can only be discovered after finishing it, and they certainly make it worth your while...continued
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(Reviewed by Davida Chazan).
The whole world watched the Romanian revolution and the fall of the country's leader Ceausescu (pronounced chow-shess-ku) in December 1988. Before that historic time, not many outsiders had any idea of what was really going on in this Eastern European country. Although I did not visit Romania until 1992, I did have an inkling of what was going on because, in late 1987, I took a position with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJJDC), to work with their welfare programs in Romania.
Romania is about the size of West Germany, just to the west of the Black Sea. Prior to the fall of communism, it was nestled between the Former USSR to the north (now Ukraine), with Hungary to the north-west and Bulgaria to the south. The so-...
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