Library Journal
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What is it like living in the autumn of a dictator's reign? How do years of oppression and trauma affect generations? Nobel Prize-winning novelist Müller (The Fox Was Ever the Hunter) provides answers with stark and unnerving insight into the mind of one who suffered the effects of Eastern European fascist rule. Presented as conversations between Müller and her editor, Angelika Klammer, the book traces the unnerving strangeness of Müller's life under Ceauescu's totalitarian rule. Müller looks back with a dim, pessimistic view, but there is still beauty, profound insight, and occasional humor, like when she threw an accordion down the village well to avoid music lessons, a story that is cathartic and relatable to any child who had to practice an instrument. Then there are stories of mundanity in Romania, from the bland, standardized clothing to soulless state-sponsored music and the overpowering paranoia that anyone in the community could betray another. Müller displays a singular mind that views the world in distinctive ways and shows the generational impact of oppression. VERDICT Müller offers an excellent addition to any memoir collection, shedding light on a time and place that deserve more attention.—Mason Bennett

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A memoir from the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, crafted through conversation with her editor. Müller spent her childhood working in the fields surrounding her remote village, a member of the Banat Swabian ethnic German minority in Romania. This was the period of Romania’s Socialist experiment, presided over by Nicolae Ceauşescu and his vicious secret police, the Securitate. Despite the misery, poverty, and desperation of communism, with its gray uniformity, Müller was, from an early age, drawn to the beauty and mystery of natural details, the poetry of superstition, and the specific configurations of words. These sensibilities, along with her gift for piercing, discerning attention, are all on display as she reflects on her upbringing, her personal efforts to expose Ceauşescu’s harsh oppression, and the still oft-obscured era of Romanian history that bridged from an alliance with Adolf Hitler to governance by a Stalinist dictator. The cruel political climate meant that Müller’s career as a writer carried a flavor of intrigue, with significant censorship of her texts, clandestine meetings with editors, an underground assemblage of stubbornly artistic revolutionaries, and regular surveillance and interrogation by the Securitate. But without capitulating to thrill and heroism, the author recounts her history and its influence with matter-of-fact deliberation that holds space for the severity and aloneness that characterized so much of her life. Her sober tone casts the pervasive brutality, ugliness, and distortions of Ceauşescu’s regime into unsettling relief and crystallizes the irrevocable link between Müller’s radical loyalty to the freedom of individual expression, her insistence on speaking truth, and her fierce allegiance to art. The reader is left with a solemn wonder at the singularly meticulous power of Müller’s imagination and her inimitable, granular reverence for language. A riveting account, with bittersweet, lyrical, and hard-won wisdom packed onto every page. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Nobel laureate Müller (The Fox Was Ever the Hunter, 2016) narrates her life’s trajectory, personal resilience, and literary calling forged by her childhood in totalitarian Romania. Growing up lonely in a tiny, superstitious farming hamlet, Müller tasted wild plants and marveled at the passenger trains that barreled through the “huge Socialist cornfields.” WWII was over but still present: her father, who joined Hitler’s SS at 17, returned as an alcoholic; after her mother returned from a Soviet labor camp, she cleaned neurotically. Ethnic Germans under Ceauşescu’s regime were subject to oppression, and as a young woman, Müller was bullied by police and subjected to repeated interrogations, which she later fictionalized in The Appointment (2001). Fear was both collective and profoundly isolating. But it was within this harsh environment, where the language of the Romanian state collided with her Swabian German dialect, that Müller found her writer's voice. Writing would become a means of self-preservation and perspective—if also a reenactment of trauma. “My writing is full of stolen life and the tyranny of other people,” she confesses in this intimate retrospective.