The Appointment

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

I've been summoned, Thursday, ten sharp.

So begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceausescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before, but this time she knows it will be worse. Her crime Sewing notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. 'Marry me', the notes say, with her name and address. Anything to get out of the country. As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot while trying to flee to Hungary; to her grandparents, deported after her first husband informed on them; to Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers; and to Paul, her lover and the one person she can trust. In her distraction, she misses her stop and finds herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there suddenly puts her fear of the appointment into chilling perspective.

Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment is a pitiless rendering of the terrors of a crushing regime.

Reviews

A brooding, fog-shrouded allegory of life under the long oppression of the regime of Nicolae Ceausescu. * New York Times *
Nobody since Arthur Koestler in the 1940s has written more intelligently or with such subtle precision about life under totalitarianism ... Mller has an exceptionally rare talent - to turn the terrifying, the distorted and the hideously ugly into something uplifting and beautiful * Prospect *
Herta Muller is a passionate artist of protest. -- Eileen Battersby * Irish Times *
A strange, lyrical and disturbing allegory of life in Ceausescu's Romania. -- Hari Kunzru * Observer Books of the Year *
A tour de force in storytelling, which manages to turn the barest of prose into poetry ... Expertly translated by Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm, it is a chilling story, exquisitely told * Independent *
The Appointment is both a pleasure to read and horrifying. Written with painful clarity, it is seductively conversational, yet every sentence demands attention ... The control of ideas and pace in a novel that still allows rolling emotion behind every line is remarkable. * Herald *
A slim, masterfully written tale. * Newsweek *
Mller achieves something beautiful. She has wrested poetry from one woman's desire to remain human in an inhuman system. * Newsday *
A taut and brilliant book. * Chicago Tribune *
Mller scatters narrative bombshells across a field of dreams. * San Francisco Chronicle *

Author Bio

Born in Romania in 1953, Herta Muller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to coopoerate with Ceausescu's Securitate. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin. The recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the European Literature Prize, she also won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for her novel, The Land of Green Plums.