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the Complete Review
the complete review - dialogue



The Village on the Edge of the World

by
Herta Müller


general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

To purchase The Village on the Edge of the World


Title: The Village on the Edge of the World
Author: Herta Müller
Genre: Dialogue
Written: 2014 (Eng. 2026)
Length: 241 pages
Original in: German
Availability: The Village on the Edge of the World - US
The Village on the Edge of the World - UK
The Village on the Edge of the World - Canada
Tous les chats sautent à leur façon - France
Mein Vaterland war ein Apfelkern - Deutschland
La mia patria era un seme di mela - Italia
Mi patria era una semilla de manzana - España
from: Bookshop.org (US)
  • Writing and Surviving Ceaușescu's Romania
  • German title: Mein Vaterland war ein Apfelkern
  • Herta Müller in conversation with Angelika Klammer
  • Translated by Kate McNaughton

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Our Assessment:

B+ : fascinating and wrenching

See our review for fuller assessment.



Review Summaries
Source Rating Date Reviewer
ABC . 26/4/2017 Laura Ferrero
El País . 17/1/2017 Monika Zgustova


  From the Reviews:
  • "Estas memorias, estructuradas a la manera de una lúcida conversación con la filósofa y traductora Angela Klammer, son una delicada y profunda reflexión en torno a conceptos como la patria o el lenguaje, también alrededor de esa vida rodeada de soledad y fealdad que imponen los regímenes totalitarios. (...) Con gran acierto, Müller describe la marginación de alguien que no comulga con la ideología imperante, la comunista , como fue su caso." - Laura Ferrero, ABC

  • "(M)e llamó la atención el análisis magistral de la fealdad que creaba la dictadura con el propósito de humillar a los ciudadanos; la arquitectura, el mobiliario, la ropa, todo era desagradable y gris. (...) El arte de Herta Müller, patente en sus novelas, es saber encontrar la belleza incluso allí donde no la hay. Esta capacidad, junto al análisis del totalitarismo, son las grandes lecciones de este libro." - Monika Zgustova, El País

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Herta Müller grew up and long lived in Nicolae Ceaușescu's corrupt authoritarian Romania (she emigrated in 1987). In her conversations with Angelika Klammer in The Village on the Edge of the World she describes what life was like for her there, from village childhood to being a young writer hounded by the security services.
       She was born in the German-speaking enclave of Romania (in Nizkydorf/Nițchidorf); remarkably: "There were no Romanians in the village, and school was conducted in German. Romanian was taught around three times a week as a foreign language and apart from these lessons no one spoke Romanian".
       Her lack of nostalgia is striking, beginning with the locale she grew up in, as she notes: "I used to experience Nature as physical harassment" and admits: "I never liked the countryside" -- yet she gives a vivid impression of it and life in that isolated village.
       Müller does not romanticize childhood -- her own, or generally, suggesting also:

Childhood has a relatively short shelf life. Afterwards, you are responsible for yourself and must raise yourself for the rest of your life, whether you want to or not. How one does this, I don't know. We are so opaque to ourselves. We know the facts, but how they take effect and shape us remains a mystery: our experiences are buried inside us, and we don't know how they make us tick.
       Müller offers fascinating if horrible glimpses of the hostility she faced and the different ways the regime tried to crush her. She clung to a factory position as a translator, even when she was left with no office or desk to work on, and when she didn't have any official employment got gigs as a tutor -- none of which lasted however, because her employers were all sooner or later pressured into disassociating themselves from her. Among the bizarre-amusing anecdotes is how, when she emigrated on 28 February 1987, the Romanian authorities stamped her passport 29 February: "This day did not exist in 1987. It wasn't a leap year. And that stamp earned me untold grief from every German authority I had to deal with afterwards". (One can just imagine how something like this would drive pedantic German bureaucrats nuts; it's a brilliant bit of sabotage in its simplicity and deviousness.)
       She at least has a close circle of intellectual friends, and also one very close friendship, to a woman named Jenny -- though even she is eventually guilty of a horrific betrayal, showing the full depravity of the regime.
       Interesting sidenotes include how little of the past has been properly dealt with in Romania, with many from the security forces never properly brought to justice. Interesting, too, is the antipathy the nationalist Swabian exiles -- the German-speaking community Müller is from -- in Germany showed her, as well as how suspicious the German intelligence service was of her when she emigrated (leading also to it taking quite a while before she got German citizenship).
       Much is expressed starkly, well -- such as how:
     Once I had taken the decision to emigrate, I was finished with the country in my head. But my feet were still here.
       The book is divided into ten chapters, the bulk of which are from conversations between Müller and Klammer between December 2013 and January 2014; the odd man out here are parts focused on Oscar Pastior and Müller's novel inspired by him, The Hunger Angel; while covering much of the same territory and issues, it doesn't quite fit with the flow of the rest of the conversation.
       The final chapter is also something a bit different, focusing on Müller's collage-works, of which there have been numerous exhibitions (e.g.) and several volumes of which have been published in German but which rather defy translation (the collages are assemblages of cut-out words) -- helpfully giving English-speaking readers some insight into this part of her œuvre that they've had less exposure to.
       It's interesting also to learn that there was a time when:
for two years I only made Romanian collages. I couldn't write in Romanian, and so I wanted to see whether I could make collages out of cut-out words from Romanian magazines. [...] Without realising it, I ended up sticking together around two hundred Romanian collages. So now I have a Romanian collage book, and a whole cabinet full of Romanian words, which I will certainly never use again.
       These conversations, guided lightly by her longtime editor Klammer -- obviously deeply knowledgeable about both Müller's 's writing and her life-experiences --, make for a good biographical introduction to Müller and her work. While much of her life does not come up, what she does talk about makes for a sometimes searing portrait -- and certainly gives a very good impression of the obscenity of the Ceaușescu regime.

- M.A.Orthofer, 29 March 2026

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Links:

The Village on the Edge of the World: Reviews: Herta Müller: Other books of interest under review:

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About the Author:

       Romanian-born German-writing author Herta Müller was born in 1953. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2009.

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© 2026 the complete review

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