Herta Müller (right) was born in 1953 in Nitzkydorf, Banat, Romania, and has written novels, poetry and essays about the underdiscovered life under Romanian Communist reign, most notably Ceau?escu. Currently living in Germany, she has, today, October 8, 2009, been recognized as she who, “with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed,” says Peter Englund, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy.
The Nobel Prize in Literature, previously won by William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Camus, John Steinbeck and everyone who wrote anything you read in high school after that (almost), is given to the writer who, in the words from the will of Alfred Nobel, produces “in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction.”
Naturally, the “ideal direction” is open to interpretation. The Nobel Committee famously snubbed Tolstoy, Ibsen, Proust, Nabokov, Joyce, Updike and Dan Brown (that’s a joke) (no offense, Dan Brown), and the award was actually rejected by existentialist hero Jean-Paul Sartre, who, in all fairness, rejected everything. Writers can be nominated by members of the Swedish Academy, literature academy and society members, literature and language professors, former Nobel literature laureates, and writers’ organization presidents (according to Wikipedia), but are eventually selected by the magical and mysterious Nobel Committee within the Swedish Academy, who proposes the final potential laureates to the larger Nobel assembly. And guess what? If they can’t agree, or don’t come up with someone special enough, they don’t give it to anyone! (See years 1914, 1918, 1935, and 1940-1943.)
All the more reason to congratulate Müller. Though we’ve yet to see many of her works in English, she is opening the world’s eyes to an Eastern European reality few have acknowledged. If speaking for a entire country’s unrecognized duress isn’t an “ideal direction,” we don’t know what is.
“She was overjoyed,” Englund told reporters of Müller’s reaction to the award. “She really has a story to tell and she has a language to carry it.”
You can pick up a copy of Müller’s “The Land of Green Plums” (translated by Michael Hofmann, Northwestern University, 1998) here, and “The Appointment: A Novel” (translated by Michael Hulse, Picador, 2002) here. Both novels, though not autobiographies, are saturated with the truth of life in Romania during those difficult times, which Müller herself lived –– and we’re certain you’ll have more titles to choose from very soon.
Congratulations, Herta Müller!
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.