The Hunger Angel - Couverture rigide

Müller, Herta

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 080509301X ISBN 13 : 9780805093018

Editeur : Metropolitan Books, 2012

Synopsis

A masterful new novel from the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize, hailed for depicting the "landscape of the dispossessed" with "the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose" (Nobel Prize Committee)It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless calculus of hunger that governed the labor colony: one shovel load of coal is worth one gram of bread.In her new novel, Nobel laureate Herta Muller calls upon her unique combination of poetic intensity and dispassionate precision to conjure the distorted world of the labor camp in all its physical and moral absurdity. She has given Leo the language to express the inexpressible, as hunger sharpens his senses into an acuity that is both hallucinatory and profound. In scene after disorienting scene, the most ordinary objects accrue tender poignancy as they acquire new purpose--a gramophone box serves as a suitcase, a handkerchief becomes a talisman, an enormous piece of casing pipe functions as a lovers' trysting place. The heart is reduced to a pump, the breath mechanized to the rhythm of a swinging shovel, and coal, sand, and snow have a will of their own. Hunger becomes an insatiable angel who haunts the camp, but also a bare-knuckled sparring partner, delivering blows that keep Leo feeling the rawest connection to life.Muller has distilled Leo's struggle into words of breathtaking intensity that take us on a journey far beyond the Gulag and into the depths of one man's soul.

A propos du livre

Présentation de l'éditeur

'I know you'll return.' These are his grandmother's last words to him. Leo has them in his head as he boards the truck one freezing mid-January morning in 1945. They keep him company during the long journey to Russia. They keep him alive - through hunger, pain, and despair - during his time in the brutal Soviet labour camp. And, eventually, they will bring him back home. Leo spends the next five years shovelling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless calculus of hunger that governed the gulag: 1 shovel load = 1 gram bread. Herta Muller calls upon her unique combination of poetic intensity and detached precision to conjure the distorted world of that Soviet camp. The heart is reduced to a pump, the breath mechanized to the rhythm of a swinging shovel, and coal, sand, and cement have a will of their own. Hunger becomes an insatiable angel who haunts the camp, but also a bare-knuckled sparring partner, delivering blows that keep Leo feeling the rawest connection to life. Muller has distilled Leo's struggle into words of breathtaking intensity that take us on a journey far beyond one man's physical travails and into the depths of the human soul.

Biographie de l'auteur

Born in Romania in 1953, HERTA MULLER lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceausescu's Secret Police. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin. The recipient of the European Literature Prize, she also won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for her novel, The Land of Green Plums. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Metropolitan Books
• Date d'édition: 2012
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 080509301X
• ISBN 13: 9780805093018
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 290
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: GS1 Slovakia; https://www.gs1sk.org; ; Nantersk� 23; Žilina; 010 08; Slovaquie