The Appointment: A Novel

The Appointment: A Novel

Herta Müller

Language: English

Pages: 240

ISBN: 0312655371

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


From the winner of the IMPAC Award and the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, a fierce and devastating novel about a young woman's discovery of betrayal in the most intimate reaches of her life

"I've been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp." Thus begins a day in the life of a young factory worker during Ceausescu's totalitarian regime. She has been questioned before; this time, she believes, 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 Romania.

As each tram stop brings the young woman closer to the appointment, her thoughts stray to her father and his infidelities; to her friend Lilli, shot trying to flee to Hungary; to her grandparents, deported after her own husband informed on them; and to Paul, her lover, her one source of trust despite his drunkenness. In her distraction, she misses her stop and finds herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the interrogation pale by comparison.

Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment powerfully renders the humiliating terrors of a crushing regime and its corrosive effects on family and friendship, sex and love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

as Papa called the squashed bugs that dried in various shades of red and yellow. I saw women wearing white stockings and embroidered shoes and men with pinched faces and walking sticks—all Lilli’s relations. Her father came from a valley in the hilly region, a mere wisp of a village, where the plum trees were drenched with blue and the branches sagged. The driver had to wait until Lilli was at last completely covered by earth. Lilli’s soul would soon be in the care of the cemetery cats, but it

the leaning tower. His mother found out just as quickly. She sent her son a letter that was written in a shaky hand and riddled with mistakes. It began: Light of my life, my own flesh and blood. It went on: There are girls who are like flowers or angels. But you, my son, are wrapping yourself in a rag that everyone’s already used to wipe themselves. This woman loves neither you nor her country. She will poison your heart. Do not let her cross my threshold. You are throwing your life into the

her. The driver might have some aspirin, I say. The man with the briefcase reaches into his pocket: I think I have one left. A shriveled strip of cellophane crackles as he smoothes it flat: No—they’re all gone, now I remember, I took the last one this morning. There’s a pharmacy at the market, says the young man by the door. The old woman turns her head, I need the tablet now, not when we get to the marketplace. She moves up the tram from one row of seats to the next, steadying herself with both

there in the sun, completely empty. To ask what it was doing there would have been as senseless as asking the same thing of the trees, the clouds, or the rooftops. I was just about ready to accept the idea that the unoccupied car should simply be where it was. Up here in the flat Paul’s steps were making the floor creak, while down below on the sidewalk a woman walked into her own shadow. The summer clouds were bright and high, or, rather, soft and close, while Paul and I seemed as if we’d been

practically empty; he gives the vacant seats a quick scan and decides to stand. It’s amazing how old people like him don’t get tired, that they don’t save their standing for places where they can’t sit. Now and then you hear old people say: There’ll be plenty of time for lying down once I’m in my coffin. But death is the last thing on their minds, and they’re quite right. Death never has followed any particular pattern. Young people die too. I always sit if I have a choice. Riding in a seat is

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