Betrayal as a Way of Life

By Peter Filkins

Published: Sunday, October 21, 2001

''I MYSELF am nothing, apart from being summoned,'' says the unnamed narrator of Herta Müller's novel ''The Appointment,'' as she rides a tram to her interrogation by Romania's secret police under Nicolae Ceausescu's regime. There her interrogator, Major Albu, places a wet kiss on her hand before questioning her relentlessly for hours. These sessions, however, do not happen on a regular schedule, but at Albu's whim, thus forcing the narrator to live a life in which she fears being called in on any given day, never knowing if she will be arrested for good. In this way the premise of ''The Appointment'' is both simple and direct. Taking place during a single tram ride, the novel follows the twists and turns of the narrator's memories and consciousness as she contemplates a world in which ''happiness had become a liability,'' and even ''tenderness has its own meshes.''

With the specter of the regime constantly hovering over her, it's no surprise that the narrator can trust no one. Even love suffers under such conditions; she realizes that ''on the days when I wasn't summoned, they trampled on my heart, because they were after Paul,'' her second husband. Though Paul is her one source of stability, he is also an alcoholic. In her vigor to get him to stop drinking, she turns into a kind of interrogator herself, complaining that ''drinkers never admit anything, not even silently to themselves -- and they're not about to let anyone else squeeze it out of them, especially somebody who's waiting to hear the admission.''

Müller -- who grew up in a German-speaking family in Romania but did not write about her homeland until after she migrated to Germany in 1987 -- is more interested in examining the fallout among personal relationships under totalitarianism than she is the wrongs of the regime itself. As with her 1993 novel, ''The Land of Green Plums,'' the thuggery of the government is a backdrop to the brutality and betrayal with which people treat one another in their everyday lives, be they spouses, family members or the closest of friends. Müller intensely investigates why this happens; her narrator contemplates the innumerable ways in which the treachery of the government infects its citizens. ''How often have I had to lie or keep my mouth shut to protect the people I love most,'' she thinks, though she realizes that despite such fidelity, ''with a hint of love on the one hand, and a heap of self-reproach on the other, I was already surrendering to the next hatred.''

In the world of ''The Appointment,'' no bond is unbreakable, no loyalty is lasting, and no future is certain. Instead, life amounts to a sequence of arbitrary episodes, each undermining the other. Because of this, the narrator's private effort to impose order on a wide array of losses amounts to a political stance in itself. Admitting that ''senselessness was easier for me to handle than aimlessness,'' she can only try to arrange the shards of her experience into some semblance of order while traveling on the tram. The order she seeks, however, is not that of Major Albu and his own sinister logic. To him, the narrator's pathetic attempt at emigration while sewing her name, address and a note saying ''Marry me'' into jackets bound for Italy from the clothing factory where she works can only mean that she is guilty of prostitution while on the job, as well as much else he seeks to get out of her. ''You see, everything is connected,'' he yells at her, to which she coolly replies, ''In your mind they are, in my mind they aren't.''

Müller is also resistant to forms of order that provoke an automatic and possibly false response; ''The Appointment'' is a book whose plot is not so much convoluted as it is devoid of apparent direction. Dipping in and out of her life while she is on the tram, it shuttles back and forth across the narrator's memory in a haphazard manner. At one moment she can be thinking of the adultery of her bus-driver father, then of an argument with Paul, then of the betrayal and internment of her grandparents by her first husband and his father and finally of the death of her friend Lilli during an attempt to escape to Hungary. No specific connections are made among any of these people or events, and the sequence of the incidents is seldom made clear. It's as if the narrator, and by extension Müller, distrusted even the reader, afraid that if she were to tell her story in a more conventional fashion she would not only betray the harrowing nature of her experience, but also herself.

''Instead of these thoughts we're constantly mulling over, it would be better to have the actual things inside your head, so you could reach in and touch them,'' the narrator says about life in Romania, but it's also a notion that holds true for the reader of Müller's novel. Given the intensity of the situation it seeks to capture, it makes sense that ''The Appointment'' is difficult to read. But what's unfortunate is that it's also not very rewarding. I found it impossible to establish a clear narrative arc, even though the narrator's tram ride, and a mortifying discovery by her at the end of it, would seem to provide just such a natural underpinning. The narrator's isolation and the numbing way in which she walks through life while wondering, ''Does any of this really mean anything, or is it just there for you to wonder about,'' mean ''The Appointment'' is more a test of endurance than a pleasure. One could argue that this is precisely the point, given the duress and despair Müller seeks to capture, but duress in and of itself does not make a novel.

Michael Hulse and Philip Boehm's translation also challenges our patience, for though it is generally quite sound, too often it falls into slack, run-on sentences. (''A breeze was rustling in the ash trees, I listened to the leaves, perhaps Paul was listening to the water.'' Or ''The giant blue mailbox is in front of the post office, how many letters can it take.'') Such sentences may be effective in German, but they can seem an arbitrary annoyance in English. Similarly, though Müller is out to disrupt our own sense of comfort as readers by undermining traditional narrative order, ''The Appointment'' turns into the kind of novel you might be glad you finished, but sorry that you started, no matter the bleak complexity within it.

Peter Filkins's new book of poems, ''After Homer,'' will be published in January. He teaches writing and literature at Simon's Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Mass.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/21/books/betrayal-as-a-way-of-life.html?scp=1&sq=%22Herta%20Mueller%22&st=cse