TRAVELING ON ONE LEG By Herta Müller

TRAVELING ON ONE LEG
By Herta Müller.
Northwestern University, $24.95.

February 21, 1999

Review by WILLIAM FERGUSON

Herta Müller grew up in a German-speaking family in southwestern Romania and studied German and Romance philology at the University of Timisoara. After repeated harassment by Nicolae Ceausescu's secret police, she managed to emigrate to West Germany in 1987. ''Traveling on One Leg,'' a superb short novel first published in German in 1989 and ably translated here by Valentina Glajar and Andre Lefevere, traces the disorientations of exile through the troubled mind of Irene, a 30-year-old woman whose circumstances are partly drawn from Müller's life. Like her, Irene emigrates to West Berlin from ''the other country'' (in the novel, Romania is never identified directly). Certain elements introduced in the first chapter -- bushes, fingernails, crumbling earth, the sucking of the tide -- become symbols of intense sexual longing that reappear throughout the book. The narration is spare to the point of madness, a poetry of anguish built upon images of division or inversion (''Irene walked on her head''). When she is photographed, it seems to her that the picture shows ''the other Irene,'' an alter ego that shadows her life; when she walks through an apartment for the first time, the rooms are said to walk through her instead. Irene's immediate reaon for emigrating is to be with Franz, a drunken tourist from Marburg whom she meets at a beachside cafe in Romania. When she reaches Germany, Irene finds herself drawn into intimate relationships, not only with Franz but also with his friends, Thomas and Stefan. All three men, especially Thomas, seem to be miserable in one way or another. Irene can't understand how a person would go about being sad in the disordered West; in ''the other country,'' she says, the reasons for unhappiness were always obvious. The action in this volume may be slight, but Irene's innermost consciousness -- where the political has indeed become the personal -- is magnificently portrayed.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/02/21/bib/990221.rv112146.html?_r=1