The Globe and Mail

When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Herta Müller last year, some criticized the choice on the grounds that there was something political about it. They were right, I think. But they were right for different reasons: Müller's work is political not in any superficial way, but in the more profound sense of literature as bearing witness. Hers is a work where the aesthetic and the political fuse in such a way that one is incomprehensible without the other. Sometimes “telling the truth” can be a distinctly political gesture, and in Müller's work both “telling” and “truth” are so important that, in a way, storytelling is for her truth-telling. Hence its tremendous importance for charting the disastrous history of 20th-century Europe.

Thanks to the works of Solzhenitsyn and others, the Western reader has become familiar with Stalin's Soviet Union at its cruellest. At the other end of the totalitarian spectrum, because of a Havel, Kundera, Milosz or Kertesz, there is a certain understanding of what happened in Czechoslovakia, Poland or Hungary, where the existence (and persistence) of a strong dissident culture prevented the respective communist regimes from becoming excessively oppressive. In contrast, comparatively few literary works are available in the West to represent that curious mix of bleakness, absurdity, cruelty and senselessness that was Ceausescu's Romania.

There is a Romantic misconception that terror has always to be impressive, fierce and appropriately Luciferian – in other words, that terror is nothing if it is not spectacular. However, that's rarely the case in real life. As Czeslaw Milosz excellently put it in The Native Realm, “Terror is not … monumental; it is abject, it has a furtive glance, it destroys the fabric of human society and changes the relationships of millions of individuals into channels for blackmail.” Terror can be mediocre, even idiotic, yet omnipresent. Terror can be terribly banal, utterly un-Romantic, but never-ending. Terror is when the secret police persuade your best friend to inform on you; when objects start moving around your room in your absence; when the secret police interrogator tells you, right before you leave his office after a day-long interrogation, that “accidents do happen,” or when your friends start committing (poorly) staged suicides.

Müller's work ... maps out, with surgical precision, this mediocre yet sinister face of European totalitarianism

That's why Herta Müller's work is so important: It maps out, with surgical precision, this mediocre yet sinister face of European totalitarianism, which is something that has been largely unaccounted for. Her novels document the oppressive fears and anxieties of a world turned upside-down, a world where the secret police do not necessarily kill you, but mess up your life enough to make you lose your mind.

Take The Appointment, a novel about a tram ride, a 214-page tram ride. The narrative slowly and laboriously finds its way through a complex web of flashbacks, recollections and side stories, as if to mirror the tram's tortuous itinerary through the city. While it is easy enough to determine how the trip starts, its ending is quite indeterminate as, over the last few pages, the narrative seems to melt down into a stream of hallucinations and disjointed thoughts. The main character/narrator had been headed for an appointment with her Securitate interrogator, but by the end of the story we are not at all sure that she is going to see him – see him while still in her right mind, that is. For the novel may well be read as a journey into madness. The more so as its very last sentence is an oblique reference to insanity: “The trick is not to go mad.”