The Passport

Herta Müller, The Passport, Alzira, catalan, 2009, 1986

The first book I read of the 2009 Nobel Prize for short story offers a fragmented into fifty-three chapters of great brevity and expressiveness. A voice from the field of Germanic Romania, where the writer is from, it raises, a year before her final exile in Germany, the impoverished reality of this environment. With one minute of silence, the reader knows the political pressure of the dictator Ceausescu may glimpse the veiled criticism of this reality.

The novel smells like the stories of Central smell of Thomas Mann or Vassili Grossman. And more The days (1934) Bánffry Midler, who knew well the same space as Müller. On this occasion stands, without doubt, the level of suggestion and a condensation minúsucula stories that together give us a stuffy atmosphere, desperate, a man, Windisch, which fails to escape its status as failed. If the topics addressed were not so grim and dark, we could speak of a luminous prose, while the writer offers a wealth of images and reflections of landscapes depicting a key moment in modern European history. Windisch, a man of few words, offers some of the statements, along with the strange characters that surround it, most impressive of the novel: “The man is strong, stronger than beasts” (p. 10). All this, as an expression of resignation of the suffering they feel, an expression that refers to the title of the book, a comparison that offers the image of the human animal.

Other expressions of resignation is confirmation of the lack of change through awareness “time is over” (p. 23), which leads him to realize “the time has no needles. Just turn the black spots. pursued. are pulled out of that white spot. slide down the wall becomes the floor. ” (P. 24). The cruelty of that society, marked by the forcible expropriation of land to farmers, led to the realization of the metaphor becomes a symbol of the apple tree behind the church “ate his own apples” (p. 38) . A species of Saturn devouring the children that allows the reader to understand the degree of desperation of the inhabitants of the land. A black and white portrait of a society that continues to insist on a future in color. An incisive prose, thorough, that grabs the reader from the start.