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Herta Müller’s novels describe everyday fear and suffering in Ceausescu's totalitarian Romania, among its perverted ideals and distortions, under its persecution and terror, mostly in the large and multicultural town of Temesvár. This Romania seems to be a country where truths are unspeakable and everything is covered by silence, by falsehood, by hidden thoughts and by a kind of secrecy. For me the strongest expression of this situation is The fox was the hunter. Adina, the protagonist is a teacher, and when she refuses to work for Securitate, she has to become aware of the omnipresence of terror. She gets death threats, but not in a simple way. For the Securitate it is very easy to come to the homes of suspects to rummage through their personal belongings, so the secret organization has a lot of methods to give a message to Adina. So the threats are communicated in a symbolic-methaphoric language: she has a fox pelt in her flat, and when she isn’t at home, Securitate officers regularly cut off a part of the fox (the tail first, then the back paws, the front paws etc). So the intimidation isn’t direct and brutal, but has a deeper impact bacause of its symbolic language, by which it can enter in the deeper spheres of the personality. I think this way of the communication is a metonymy of the novel itself. Since the novel uses the same way of speech: it is neither a documentary novel, nor a memoire, but a poetic text containing a lot of metaphors, and using them in a similar way as the Securitate officers do. These metapors are used in the novel in the same surreal and grotesque way as in the action of the Securitate, and so the story becomes a cut-and-paste patchwork of small images and symbols. That makes Müller’s unique style and that’s why she said: “Books about bad times are often read as testimonies. Yet, in writing, I don’t feel like I’m bearing witness. I learned to write from silence and secrecy.” And one can continue her confession: her style is built up on this „silence and secrecy”, because metaphors can be used and understood only in „silence and secrecy”.
Herta Müller: A róka volt a vadász
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http://www.new-books-in-german.com/english/646/253/253/129002/design1.html
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