Lagraziana's Kalliopeion

Not so long ago many Romanians like Nobel Prize laureate Herta Müller and the protagonists of her novella The Passport (Der Mensch ist ein großer Fasan auf der Welt litterally translated: Man is Nothing But a Pheasant in the World) ventured at the bureaucratic troubles involved in legal emigration from a Communist country. The writer tells the story of a miller family in a small German-speaking village in Western Romania in the 1980s. Mr. and Mrs. Windisch and their grown-up daughter Amalie are waiting for their passports and visa to Germany for what seems to them ages. They have to play by the rules which comprise courruption and sexual assault.

The simple plot of The Passport, that was first published in Germany in 1986, is intensified by the description of seemingly unimportant objects and observations that intersperse the entire text. It isn’t easy to read between the lines and to decipher the true meaning of the symbolic language that often reminds me of a game of word associations. The writing style of Herta Müller is often compared to that of Franz Kafka although in this early novella I don’t see much of a resemblance. Maybe Herta Müller's later work reminds of Kafka?

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