The Land of Green Plums

The green plums of the title belong to the guards and soldiers the narrator watches gorging on unripe fruit straight off the trees, stomachs visibly aching afterward, a compulsive, self-punishing greed that Muller ties to a whole system built on people consuming whatever is put in front of them regardless of the cost. For the narrator and her friends, remembering childhood hunger and the plums nobody was allowed to eat until ripe becomes a private vocabulary for danger, something that predates the dictatorship and outlasts any single informer.

Muller writes the surveillance itself at the level of the body: fingernail clippings left behind after an apartment search, a strand of hair moved half a centimeter on a shelf, evidence that someone has been inside your rooms without needing to say so. Letters arrive already opened and resealed, a small daily violence that trains the four friends, the narrator, Edgar, Kurt, and Georg, to write in code even to each other, until suspicion of betrayal becomes as corrosive as the actual informer, Captain Pjele, whose interrogations run through the whole book like weather.

Early in the novel, the narrator's dormitory roommate Lola is found dead, apparently by her own hand, and the Party responds not with sympathy but with theater, expelling her from the Communist Youth posthumously and reading her private diary aloud at a mandatory meeting to hold her up as a moral warning. The scene sets the pattern for everything that follows: the state does not just watch its citizens, it repossesses their most private writing and turns it into propaganda, which is exactly the fate the narrator spends the rest of the book trying, and largely failing, to keep her own friends' deaths from suffering.

Müller grew up in a German-speaking minority village in Romania before moving to Bucharest and, eventually, into exile in West Berlin in 1987, and the novel's German prose keeps a Romanian ear inside it, proverbs, official slogans, playground rhymes translated so literally they sound freshly strange rather than idiomatic. The Swedish Academy's 2009 citation praised her for writing, in its words, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose to depict the landscape of the dispossessed, a description that fits this novel's short, hard paragraphs better than almost anything else in her body of work.