The Appointment

The Appointment
Herta Muller
2002
224 pages

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It’s at times like this when I wish I was fluent in many languages. Then I could tell the FTC I bought it in Romanian. Wouldn’t that be cool? Of course, they’d probably report me to Homeland Security.

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I actually read a book for my own World Party Challenge. I feel so accomplished.

Not as accomplished as Herta Muller, though. She’s got a Nobel Prize under her belt.

The Appointment is one of those “day in the life” books. I’m totally stealing the Macmillan blurb, though, because the book is also kind of stream of consciousness and hard to follow:

From the winner of the IMPAC Award, a fierce novel about a young Romanian woman’s discovery of betrayal in the most intimate reaches of her life

“I’ve been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp.” Thus begins one day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceaucescu’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 the country.

As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli, shot 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, her one source of trust, despite his constant drunkenness. In her distraction, she misses her stop to find herself on an unfamiliar street. And what she discovers there makes her fear of the appointment pale by comparison.

Herta Müller pitilessly renders the humiliating terrors of a crushing regime. Bone-spare and intense, The Appointment confirms her standing as one of Europe’s greatest writers.

Have you read this book? Anyone? Because that chilling ending that they allude to? I so didn’t get it! Okay, I kind of got it, maybe, if it deals with trust, but it wasn’t the big whammy I was expecting. I could speculate more into it, but then I’m not sure I’m going in the right direction. So… HELP!!

Anyhoosie, this one really wasn’t my cup of tea. It’s got that grim style that is actually fitting for the totalitarian state that it is set in, but that leaves me cold. And since it focuses on one person and a particular point in time, it 1) can be hard to figure out what is going on and 2) makes me want more history with my story.

And as I mentioned before, this is my book for the May World Party, since it is set in a formerly communist country.