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‘The Passport’ was first translated and published in the UK in 1989 but since its author, Herta Mueller, was awarded the Nobel Prize earlier this year, it has be reprinted to meet the popular demand. It is a slim volume of novella length but the form is deceiving. The book tells the story of Windish, a simple miller in a forgotten German village in Romanian where the signs are plain for everyone to see: the end is nigh. All Windish needs to escape the dull misery of corruption and poverty, is a passport but it comes at a price.

The story is told very matter of fact with a steady rhythm and stark images. The short chapters, some only a page long, are snapshot of the village-life, presented to us through the use of prose poetry. The lyrical language builds up to a panoramic overview. The sentences are concise to the point of being minimal (verb subject, noun). There are no frills and very few adjectives and adverbs. This proves an ideal combination to portray the bleakness which lies across the village like a blanket. It is a dark, claustrophobic paragraph of European history written in a dark, claustrophobic language. If anything, the restricted vocabulary adds to the vibrant and breathtaking poetry. 

Herta Mueller takes the concept of metaphor and extends it to its surreal extreme. She is like a Magritte of words, infused symbolic images with meaning and weaves them into ever new tales: an apple tree is under suspicion of eating its own apples until it is eventually caught and punished, a tear that has turned sweet after it has shed its saltiness and is carried in a box, and a song with a stone in it. We learn about Widow Kroner, the village idiot, the priest and the night watchman. It is a timeless fairytale and yet it is chillingly real. 

The Swedish Academy, which awarded the Nobel Prize, compared Mueller’s work to Kafka as she uses German as a minority language. She herself has suffered a great deal at the hands of the Rumanian Secret Police and claims to have been under observation for many years, even after the end of the dictatorship. Eventually she was forced to move to West Germany. We may now wonder if the Nobel Prize was given to mark a political discrepancy or if it is given purely for literary merit. But of course everything is political without necessarily being Political. Often the Nobel Price is given towards the end of a writer’s career, to put the final cherry on the cake of achievements. This certainly seemed to be the case with Heaney and Lessing.  It is therefore refreshing to see a female author in her fifties being celebrated for her work and there is no doubt that Mueller’s work is worthy of attention, it is urgent and beautiful and real in all its surrealism. 

Valeria Melchioretto