Traveling on One Leg

Travelling on One Leg Traveling on One Leg  Hmm - isn't the Grman title "Reisende auf einem Bein" better translated as Travelers on one Leg?Reading the top review will help understand my perspectives below.An Allegory of Emigration and LongingIrene (really Herta Mueller herself) has dreams about what it will be like in her new homeland. The old one is symbolically portrayed as a masturbator in the bushes who asks her to just stand there while he takes his pleasure. He won't harm her, he says deceptively (because the damage has already been done). The new land of her dreams is embodied in a self - centered drunk traveler she first meets right before her departure. She falls instantly in love but we are given not the least indication why. Of course, she would be in love with any country that was not Romania! She looks him up once emigrated and he is still distant, still in another city, and sends stand-ins, two men, one (Stefan) a sociologist,no less, who fall s in love with her and the other bisexual and intriguing (Thomas) with whom she also has an affair. In a comparison the masturbator, (Irene always compares her new country with the old) Thomas represents a country that is distant and self - centered; in which she cannot yet assimilate or belong. The new country is Germany, to which she has ancestral ties as an ethnic German Banat Shwobe, but those links were long ago frayed by Nazi dictatorship and abuses of her father and community during WWII; and she finds her longstanding isolation in Romania transposed and metamorphosed into loneliness and failed dreams in Germany. The longing for community in her new land is as frustrated as her sexual relations with these men. All is expressed in this wonderful book in mysterious, ambiguous prose that merges into poetry. No paragraph is a clear unambiguous description of a scene, character, or inner state. All is allusion. Indirection. Shards of splendor and pebbles of rubble in her shoe. The cars in a street covered with yellow leaves remind her of coffins. Are they for her despair, a commentary on German society, or for her dreams of what life could be like in her new land? Is she homesick? - not in the normal way, but her fears that consumed her in Romania have not been allayed and have a life of their own. She is interviewed by an immigration official and the bureaucracy of the Romanian Securitate who have hounded her for years exudes in the small details of coffee cups and the indifferent chats between the agent and an assistant. A letter from a friend in Romania revives her gratefulness for her new freedom (revealed as sexual energy and desire) intertwined with a sense of loss of all her goals of escaping persecution that have driven her so many years and are now cataclysmically irrelevant. She is drained, spent, empty, lonely, struggling to find new goals. The indelible marks of persecution and a tarnished broken family life pervade every daily activity. There is much sickness but no home. If you can feel emotionally sympathetic and at home in this bleak atmosphere, this book has much to offer. It grapples with the complexity of life in ways no other author has dared. There is no moralizing; only poetry.The novella itself offers the excitement of novelty and experimentation. There is no clear narrative structure, only sentences that are as isolated as Irene in her new land. They are often disconnected details of her everyday surroundings; fragments of people and situations; allusions and indirections. Their meaning and relevance is often very obscure. There is much surreal detail: a vein leaves the eye and traces a nose; strangers' narratives constantly slip into Irene's and are not distinguished or separate: salespeople talk to other customers as if to Irene. Some of it seems stream of consciousness displaced onto the objects that surround, but it is seldom a continuous stream; more like disrupted flitting from object to thought to object again, and so on. In a way, it is like the collage at the center of the novel, with odd images combined until they acquire a meaning of their own, but other images excluded but seeking combination even outside the collage. Some of this works fluidly but the poor reader is often the one left out of the collage. This fragmentary structure is used to effect in some of the other novellas, such as the Land of Green Plums, but there the narrative story line was compelling itself, with a mystery that demanded resolution (like her fate with the Securitate or the nature of her relationships; or the success of overcoming obstacles to obtain an exit). Here the nature of success with her relationships is completely obscure; there is no way to know if any success has been achieved; and obtaining German citizenship seems straightforward and without suspense. So there is no overarching narrative to hold a reader's interest and suspense. Instead one must be satisfied with the ordinary course of life and its living rather than its dramatization. The novella comes to a termporary closure with (no spoiler alert needed) citizenship in the end, and apparently a fitting in, conciliation with German society at large,as at last she has some fulfillment with Franz.

Many (most? all?) of the novels by Herta Mûller, the 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, deal in one way or other with life in her native Romania and/or life as an exile in West Germany, where she emigrated in 1987. TRAVELING ON ONE LEG is no exception. First published in 1989, it is an experiential account of the flight of Irene, a young woman of about 30, to West Berlin and then her first year or so living there, through the time she is granted German citizenship. Life in Romania (identified in the novel only as "the other country") is bleak and grim, but life in West Berlin is not much better. Irene inhabits a life of profound solitariness, occasionally sharing a weekend, evening, or bed with one of three German men, but never interacting or communicating with them in any uplifting or interpersonal fashion. And no one else in Germany - neither any of her three male acquaintances or any of the other automatons she bumps into in her daily goings-on - seems to be living an interesting or satisfying life either.Near the end of the novel, Irene says "I understood why people were unhappy in the other country. The reasons were obvious. It hurt a lot to see the reasons day in day out. * * * And here, I know there are reasons. I can't see them. It hurts not to be able to see the reasons day in day out."I do not doubt that similar disappointment and confusion is experienced by many émigrés from the former communist states of eastern Europe. Nor do I doubt that many people often experience life as a series of disconnected episodes, some quite dreamlike or hallucinatory in nature. Nor do I doubt that some poor souls fixate inordinately on mundane objects - graffiti, a pebble in a shoe, a pubic hair in the bathtub. But such are not intrinsically the makings of a rewarding novel. To transform such meager material into literature requires, at a minimum, inspired writing and, probably, a generous dose of humor (madcap or acerbic). TRAVELING ON ONE LEG lacks any such transformative qualities. The writing is spare and stark - as flat and black-and-white as the world of Irene it so numbingly portrays.This is the third of Mûller's works of fiction that I have read in translation in the past six months. After reading one ("The Passport"), I could understand how other works of its author might conceivably warrant a Nobel Prize for Literature. Not so with either "Nadirs" or TRAVELING ON ONE LEG. To the contrary, based on them the award of the Nobel Prize to Herta Mûller is somewhat bewildering.

Reading this book is like looking at your first Picasso. It is a collage. It is your responsibility as a reader to put the pieces together, to survive your confusion, to achieve unity. The author is a genius, and there is no way around it.

I ordered a book by Herta Muller - which is used but looks and feels pretty much new - on a Friday and received it three days later. Everything is in perfect condition and I would definitely recommend Kingdom Textbooks to anyone who's looking for a reliable and responsible seller. Cheers!