Although Nadirs and The Land of Green Plums have now been reissued in English, when Herta Muller won the Nobel Prize for Literature in October this year, only The Passport was available for monoglots wishing to gain a flavour of her work. Fortunately, it seems to be a fine example of her recurring themes and sparse prose style. Muller was born in 1953 in a German-speaking village in Western Romania and her work predominantly focuses on the harsh conditions of life in Ceausescu’s Romania and on the persecution of ethnic German Romanians by the occupying Stalinist forces.

The Passport portrays the stifling hopelessness of Ceausescu’s regime as experienced by village miller Windisch, an ethnic German who wants to escape life in Romania and so applies for a passport to freedom and the glittering temptations of the West. Drudging through his daily life, never giving up hope but at the same time never truly believing that something better is out there for him, Windisch obsesses over the passing of time and the mundane, cyclical nature of his existence:

‘Each morning, as he cycles alone along the road to the mill, Windisch counts the day. In front of the war memorial he counts the years. By the first poplar tree beyond it, where he always hits the same pot hole, he counts the days. And in the evening, when Windisch locks up the mill, he counts the years and days once again.’

With local government officials running a nice sideline selling Romania-born Germans to West Germany, obtaining a passport is no easy feat. Windisch believes that his occupation as a miller will be the key to success and so he begins to leave sacks of flour outside the home of the mayor by way of bribes. Times may be hard for the poor and the ethnically persecuted, but the rich were doing rather nicely under Ceausescu and so all Windisch’s offerings of flour gains him is starvation for his family during the winter. When this first attempt at bribery fails, Windisch, blinded by his own desire to escape, sends his daughter to visit the homes of village officials.

Windisch’s life is one of conflict and oppression, his village is populated by forlorn, trapped people, and the tone of The Passport reflects superbly his sense of hopelessness and despair. Of course this does mean that it is rather a depressing read, all the more so since Muller exhibits such a limited, almost stilted, use of language. Sentences such as “Windisch shivers” and “Amalie points at the map”, especially when used by a Nobel prize-winner, are bound to polarise readers. What the Nobel committee referred to as the “frankness of prose”, Tibor Fischer in his review for the Guardian described as “With the possible exception of Dan Brown or Barbara Taylor Bradford, prose doesn’t come any franker than this”. Damning praise indeed. It is true that Muller never seems to build on her prose, she has her sparse language style and she sticks to it. However, while her style might not be to everyone’s taste, in a short, fragmented novel like The Passport it does serve well to convey the haunted melancholy of Windisch’s village and the oppressive uselessness of his situation.

The dark days of Ceausescu’s totalitarian regime in Romania are as important to remember as they are horrifying to recollect; while Windisch might be just one man, the drudgery and depression of his life are reflections of the suffering heaped upon whole communities. Muller’s greatest success in The Passport is her unnerving ability to portray with absolute clarity the dreadful hopelessness that can infect the souls of man and the ease with which government and bureaucracy can triumph over humanity.

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