The Village on the Edge of the World - by Herta Müller (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

From her childhood in Romania, in a village "as small as a thimble on the edge of the world," through to life in exile in Germany, Herta Müller's story unspools against the tumultuous history of Romania in the latter half of the twentieth century. Here, the Nobel Prize laureate reflects on cultural history, memory, and trauma, and on what it was to live and write under Ceausescu's regime. She revisits the friendships that buckled under the weight of fear and paranoia; the experience of being surveilled and interrogated; and on the unique blend of fear and tedium borne through life under totalitarianism.

The Village on the Edge of the World is a book that chronicles the minutiae of life under both fascism and the Soviet Union, while charting the existential questions posed by these regimes of the twentieth century--and how they remain with us in the twenty-first. This is a powerful and evocative reflection on life behind the Iron Curtain.

Review Quotes

"The reader is left with a solemn wonder at the singularly meticulous power of Müller's imagination and her inimitable, granular reverence for language. A riveting account, with bittersweet, lyrical, and hard-won wisdom packed onto every page."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Praise for Herta Müller:

"With the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, Müller depicts the language of the dispossessed."--Jury of the Nobel Prize for Literature

"A dark collage, which glints with fear--and with beauty . . . Müller's prose--as poetic as it is blunt--works like a prism, shattering and illuminating a world that is always watching, waiting."--The Atlantic

"Especially now, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's a beautiful signal that such high quality literature and this life experience are being honoured."--Angela Merkel

"Herta Müller is a passionate artist of protest."--Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

"Herta Müller is a writer who releases great emotional power through a highly sophisticated, image studded, and often expressionistic prose."--Neal Ascherson, The New York Review of Books

"Müller scatters narrative bombshells across a field of dreams."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Nobody since Arthur Koestler in the 1940s has written more intelligently or with such subtle precision about life under totalitarianism... Müller has an exceptionally rare talent--to turn the terrifying, the distorted and the hideously ugly into something uplifting and beautiful."--Prospect Magazine

"Perhaps no author has captured the surreal textures of Iron Curtain paranoia quite like Herta Müller."--Vogue.com (Best Books of the Month)

"Remarkable . . . The Fox draws on what she suffered while clenched in the jaws of one of history's most notorious dictatorships. But she infuses characters and events with surreal elements and heightened levels of metaphor that make this much more than a roman à clef. . . . Here, dreams become extensions of life, or life itself is a dream; they are cut, at any rate, from one and the same fabric, consistently lurid and terrifying."--NPR

About the Author

Kate McNaughton is a documentary filmmaker, author, and translator, working from the French, German, and Italian. Her debut novel, How I Lose You, was published in 2018.