TO KEEP THE APPOINTMENT OR NOT?
This dystopian novel about the plight of a woman in a totalitarian regime doesn't really go anywhere. Almost throughout I wished to stop reading it. Yet, I could not.
Don’t get on the tram with the woman in The Appointment unless you are prepared for a slow, eerie ride. This is not a book for everyone because there are way too many jolts and starts—of things left unsaid or of things said in passing—that made me sit up often and say, “Wait. What?”
Now located in Berlin, the author, Herta Müller, is a Romanian-German novelist, poet, essayist and recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. I thought the writing in The Appointment was stellar. In places I was reminded of another former Romanian, the late Ludovic Bruckstein, although where Bruckstein’s writing is loopy and confessional in nature, Müller’s feels like she is influenced by the terseness and precision for which Germans are renowned.
The Appointment is an unending journey—of what is just 90 minutes—to an appointment that our nameless narrator is clearly dreading. As she rides to the meeting, we discover more and more about her. The novel puts us on several different tracks from the tram to past moments in her life, revealing a little more about her inner life as well as the characters in her life. The more we learn about her, the less we like her, of course; the more we choose to learn about the setting and the era of novel, however, the more we believe we must pardon her every sin and misstep.
We learn that Romania is under a monstrosity of a leader and that his secret police is responsible for mass surveillance as well as human rights abuses within the country, besides controlling the media and press. Clearly, this book has risen out of the author’s own experiences in the Nicolae Ceaușescu regime. Ceaușescu, the country's head of state from 1967 to 1989, was a dictator who was overthrown and executed in the Romanian Revolution in December 1989.
"I've been summoned. Thursday, ten sharp."
Thus begins this one chilling day in the life of a young clothing-factory worker during Ceaucescu's totalitarian regime. She is nameless throughout this stream of consciousness narrative. That’s clearly a choice by the author for we must interpret that the narrator is representative of all those under this repressive regime.
The woman has been questioned before but she knows that this time her experience will be much worse. She will be made to pay for her crime which is that she sewed notes into the linings of men's suits bound for Italy. "Marry me," she wrote in her notes, adding her name and address because, as everyone around her knows, anyone will do anything to leave the country.
As she rides the tram to her interrogation, her thoughts stray to her friend Lilli who was shot while trying to flee to Hungary; we also hear about her grandparents who were put on a train to work at a labor camp; we meet Major Albu, her interrogator, who begins each session with a wet kiss on her fingers; we learn more about Paul, her second husband, through the course of her novel and we see how he’s her only source of strength. Yet, something never quite adds up about Paul.
Ever since he started drinking so much, our wedding picture has proven prophetic. Whenever Paul’s out on the town, barhopping late into the night, I’m afraid he’ll never come home again, and I stare at our wedding picture until it starts to change shape. When that happens our two faces start to swim, and our cheeks shift around so that a little bit of space opens up between them.
Distracted while on the tram, the woman misses her stop and finds herself on an unfamiliar street and the novel ends abruptly at this point. The idea behind this novel, I’m realizing after reading several opinions on the subject of this story, is that it’s not really meant to go anywhere. That’s the very nature of a hellish existence in which there is no chance for optimism.
We’ve been shown a slice of life in this dreadful period in Romanian history and we must try to empathize with how deeply it affected several generations of people who were subject to the machinations of a vindictive government. As Herta Müller herself admits in this Guardian story, she is “a broken person.” Not only did she lose her job, she suffered repeated threats when she refused to cooperate (to become an informant) with Ceaușescu’s secret police.
I loved the way Müller slowly peels apart the layers of her story using the cold, steely voice of her narrator, drilling deeper into the events of her family members and her own psyche. There are brilliant insights into the world of someone who is in the grip of such terror.
I do a lot of counting. Cigarette butts, trees, fence slats, clouds, or the number of paving stones between one phone pole and the next, the windows along the way to the bus stop in the morning, the pedestrians i see from the bus between one stop and the next, red ties on an afternoon in the city. How many steps from the office to the factory gate. I count to keep the world in order, I said.
This novel demanded keen attention to each and every sentence. We were expected to make the connections from something in the past to an event taking place in the present. More often than not, the transitions from one idea to another were non-existent and the movement, unlike that of the tram, felt like a series of discontinuous segues into nowhere.
By the time the tram ride ended, I was left with a million disconnected threads of information. I felt dissatisfied. The story folds without overtly trying to answer our questions about the narrator’s husband. Just who is Paul? Why can’t he be trusted?
FROM THE WORLD OF TRANSLATION
In Praise of the Invisible, an article by by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, translated from Spanish by Anne McLean, that reflects on the role of a translator in a world increasingly affected by the onslaught of artificial intelligence.