When I finally finished this remarkable work, my mind flashed back, for some obscure reason to my early twenties (such exciting years) when I loved a man, a cat and a book. Life, of course, has to develop and move on; I lost the man (our lives were taking different directions), Sylvie died in quarantine but my magnificent book was and still remains with me: the “Alexandria Quartet” by Lawrence Durrell. I’ve tried many times to write an account on why this book has had, and still continues to have, such a dramatic effect on me and I’ve always failed. That is a twentieth century masterpiece. I’ve now come across the same problem with “The Appointment”. I have so much to say but I’m having distinct difficulties in trying to achieve this. I also wish to succeed because I want everyone possible to become aware of this book and read it.But I digress and so back to Herta Müller. This is such an incredible woman and I really don’t know where to start which rather confuses me. I’ve certainly never been lost for words before and in fact I’ve been criticized for being too verbose but then that’s my personality and I’m certainly not going to change now.What really did surprise me is that I stumbled across a writing style that I’m only recently beginning to appreciate, the stream of consciousness monologue that James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust were early exponents of.The story is actually rather banal and there’s not a plot as such as it is set on a single tram ride to our narrator’s increasing appointments, actually interrogations with Major Albu. She had made a simple mistake of wanting to escape from Nicolae Ceaușescu’s totalitarian regime in communist Romania. Our unnamed narrator’s crime (a seamstress working in a clothing factory) had been:Putting handwritten notes in the back pockets of ten white linen suits being shipped to Italy that said, "Marry me" and signed with her name and address.Various other notes had been planted which our narrator denied but Major Albu was determined to extract the truth from her come what may.I cannot even begin to imagine what it must be like living under such conditions and in a way I can see why Ms Müller decided to leave the narrator unnamed. Indirectly and in a contradictory way she is divorcing herself from the situation by living in anonymity.Although the tram ride takes ninety minutes, her various observations and the internal monologue they spark cover the breadth of her life. We learn about her past, her friends (Lilli in particular) and family, daily life and Romanian "expropriation" and other government officials, to name a few. All this appears in the landscape of her thoughts and memories. Although her stream of consciousness takes us to various places in time and space, there is a fairly diffuse sense of ennui and antipathy.This book is so powerfully written. It is a veritable tour de force. It can be depressing at times, but then bounces back with black humour and comedy; interwoven with beautiful descriptions. Betrayal and lies are also imbedded within the text but it was the attention to detail which particularly impressed me; for example, the two wicker baskets to be found outside the bus her father drives. Our narrator had realized that she has left her bag there and goes to look for it. My eyes widened and I laughed at this mesmerizing description.I kept on rereading pages and thought how did the author manage such exquisite prose when she lived under a totalitarian regime?Colours such as red and black are other powerful motifs symbolising death and showing how little life was valued in Romania at the time. Under their muzzles Lilli lay red as a bed of poppies.And,Our nameless narrator fumbled in her bag and found a small package there. It was “a finger with a bluish-black nail.Her second husband Paul’s red Java motorbike. It was such a shame that he was a drunkard but he did give our narrator happiness for the first couple of years.Amusing incidents stud the book, for example with melons but the part that really enthralled me was the New Year’s Eve paraputch (extended family according to her father-in-law) when our narrator recalls the celebration in her father-in-law’s house (by her first marriage). ”I’ll never know exactly what paraputch means. For me it sounds like a gang, because the family was so large and each member was shady in his own way.”But when the celebrations get underway, it’s sheer bedlam and I revelled in it, especially Anastasia and the lascivious widower and gardener Martin who fancied his chances with the guests!The incident that had me on tenterhooks was when our narrator cannot get off the tram at the bus station, because of an incident and because she knows that she’s going to be late for her “appointment”. When she finally gets off at the next stop she starts running and finds herself in a road where….. I had to reread this section not only one but three times. There were various interpretations here, well for me anyway, and the jury is still out on this.Another odd thing though was that there were no quotation marks or question marks throughout the book. I wonder why our author did that.I was also taken with the fact that Paul and our narrator lived in a “leaning tower”. This is a very powerful, dark and moving novel. I can only describe it as depressing-brilliance and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Ms Müller justifiably deserves being a Nobel laureate. Bravo, and bravo…
The Appointment is about life in Nicolae Ceauşescu’s communist Romania. What a simultaneously sinister and banal place. The mind won’t absorb it. The novel is in every sense a dystopia. Only in this case it happens not to be an SF fantasy but based on 20th century events. Almost without effort Herta Müller shows us the utter self-defeating nature of police states, their inefficiency, rotten core, bankrupt ideology, and doomed future.Its narrative line is elliptical. It has been written in a rich though understated style with a subtle patterning of motifs throughout. It is “story” distilled to its essentials. I suppose it might be called muscular were its anatomy not so delicately wrought. It is not chic lit. It is highly readable literary fiction, not at all cryptic, and in the end emotionally shattering. The Appointment has a fragmented narrative line. It consists of an interbraiding, if you will, of nine or ten related stories. It is not a collection of linked stories. Not at all. It is a novel. First there is the core story of our unnamed female narrator as she takes one particular streetcar journey to an interrogation with Major Albu, her tormentor in the secret police. Both city and narrator are unnamed, as are the state’s leader and its form of government. One senses Müller wants nothing to do with politics. Around this core of the streetcar trip other stories are intertwined. These include the life and death of the beautiful Lilli and her elderly lover; the story of our narrator's involvement with a co-worker, Nelu, whom she fucks out of sheer boredom during a grim business trip and will thereafter have nothing to do with; and the story of how she meets Paul, her second husband.Early on she does something very silly, something that would be laughable in any other context, but which the authorities consider treasonous. She writes her name and address on slips of paper along with an offer of marriage and inserts these "letters in a bottle" into the pockets of garments she knows will be shipped to men’s stores in Italy. Needless to say, the slips are found before shipping and she is denounced by the rejected Nelu. Henceforth, she must endure periodic interrogations by the creepy Major Albu at state security, who intentionally slobbers all over her hand when “kissing” it. This is the perfect metaphor for Power’s attitude to long tradition, especially civility to women. Albu is scary but over the course of the novel we come to see how impotent he is. Moreover, we come to know what the state fears: its dissolution by unknown means. A fate it was to undergo when the democratic movement swept Eastern Europe in 1989. (One of the highlights of that period, in my view, is the videotaped assassination of the old tyrant Ceauşescu and his termagant wife. (See YouTube for video.) The state’s involvement in the minutia of its citizens’s lives never fails to astound the reader. But why? It seems to me it would be like sending your innocuous kid sister in for questioning. Why do it? Of what possible intelligence value can there be in interrogating a young woman who works in a button factory? It is done solely in the name of ideological conformity. The people of this unnamed state have nothing to be proud of. They are essentially prisoners in their own country. Lilli is shot while trying to cross the border. Their news is hortatory propaganda. There is no cultural life to speak of, no artistic expression. Romania under Ceauşescu makes Orwell’s 1984 look like a grand day spent at Six Flags.Very striking is the consistent preference throughout of young women for old men. Young men are — no, not those on whom all hopes and dreams for the future are placed — but a thoroughly disenfranchised lot, without opportunity, almost invisible. Paul is the group’s lone representative for the duration of the book, except for one scene set in an Officers Club. Here the emasculated young men sit at tables ogling Lilli and her old man and tossing matchheads at them. Right or wrong, I saw the matchheads as symbols of forestalled ignition, quashed passion.The narrator’s Inexplicable first marriage is to the son of the Perfumed Commissar, once head of state expropriation, who not only took every scrap of property her grandparents owned, but then sent them to a hellish “camp,” a gulag essentially, where the grandmother promptly died, reduced to geophagy.This is a very powerful, very dark novel. I recommended it highly. However, if you are new to Herta Müller's work I would advise you to start with the even more remarkable In the Land of Green Plums.
Do You like book The Appointment (2001)?
A novel with an intriguing story about interpersonal relationships in a totalitarian state, at least that's what the dusk jacket implied. For me, this was a dull stream of consciousness that occasionally had brilliant metaphors and insights. Herta Muller received a Nobel Prize for her works, but this one (granted the only work I have read by her) left me sorely disappointed. Well, I was vacationing in Brazil when I read it. However, it wasn't the depressing subject matter that turned me off, but the first-person meandering of the narrator, the verbal wanderings of the author. Ultimately, I read half the book (just over 100 pages) and then had to drop it for fear of never waking up from my hammock.
—Ara
The appointment is the story of a woman who is riding the bus to get to a place where she has an appointment. The appointment is a set up to be interrogated by a policeman on suspected treason charges. She is accused of treason because she has been dropping "marry me" notes in a few tuxedos with the intention to send them to Italy; trying to find an Italian man that helped her escape the dictatorship regime in her country. While riding the bus, she remembers all the events that leaded her to this moments. She thinks about a lot of things and because of her intense thinking; she misses her stop and has to walk a little bit to the appointment place. While she walks; she sees her living-in boyfriend in a garage. She realizes that he had been lying to her because he always told her that he was drinking; but in reality he is engaged in some kind of work for the government. By seeing her boyfriend, the woman feels betrayed and terrified because he was the only person she trusted and now she sees that he is a liar; and then the book ends abruptly.I don't know if I liked it; but it certainly did not deliver the promise it made in the jacket.
—Ariadna73
A really pretty amazing book, and one that is sort of different than it's description-- there's none of the rompiness you'd expect from a book about a woman who randomly solicits italian men to marry her and save her from Communist Romania. I'm not saying that doesn't happen, though I think that's misrepresented, just that it's not at the core of the book.What is at the heart of the book, I think, is the relationship between our narrator, the woman who has in the past sent these notes abroad, and her lover, Paul. The book itself is a rumination on love in totalitarian cultures that really is a lot like 1984, if you take that book as primarily interested in the way such cultures deform and complicate love.I think I like this one better than '84-- the character seem richer, and there's a more engaging narrative gambit, dealing mostly with one bus ride, and what occurs to the narrator along the way. But I suppose your mileage may vary. Really, a bracing, dynamic, challenging and deeply enjoyable book.
—Matt
