The Passport by Herta Müller

Herta Müller was the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. I had never heard of her and finally found one of her books in the library. Writing in German, she is a Romanian woman of German descent. In this book, The Passport, she writes about the stifling hopelessness of people living in a small village under Ceausescu's dictatorship. She writes in a sparse language, hauntingly beautiful; the sentences are just simple statements, they  are all short and factual and display the oppression suffered by the people.

I virtually forced myself to read this book very slowly, sentence by sentence, almost word by word, and then a surrealistic picture formed in my head. Light is thrown up here and there and illuminates the existing grayness and blackness. It is a very odd but beautiful and poetic reading experience about village life dominated by the wish to escape and to migrate. To achieve permission to do so and to obtain a passport, the villagers try many things, mostly under the cover of the night. The village miller tries to bribe the mayor by transporting flour sacks on his bicycle, and he fails;  the wives or daughters might be sent to the village officials and, yes, also to the local priest who takes fullest  advantage of the situation "trying to look for the missing birth certificates under the cover of the mattress of the iron bed." It is the horrors of totalitarianism told in the lone voice of village life in a forgotten region. The Passport is a very quiet book allowing the shaping of word pictures in your mind. Unforgettable.