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desirosie's review against another edition
3.0
I’m struggling with how to rate and respond to this book. I struggled to keep the threads together in my mind during my exhausted pre-bedtime reading and they would be lost to me over the course of a day. And so the ending....was not as significant as I knew it must be.
chocomuffinilla's review against another edition
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.5
f3ttt's review against another edition
5.0
The Appointment is a very sad book that tells the truth about just how horrible it is to live in a country where you can be interrogated day after day with no real purpose. Few understand just how insidious it is to have to voluntarily return to interrogation because they fear something even worse. Fewer still understand how interrogation doesn't have to do with beating a person or using hot irons, it is the neverending grinding of a human soul into madness.
The book is beautifully written and captures many of the means which the oppressed seek out to resist tyranny, infidelity, incest, snitching, domination of other poor souls, rebellion and drunkenness. I'm left sad after reading it and also suspicious of everyone I see. She's not a Nobel Laureate for nothing.
The book is beautifully written and captures many of the means which the oppressed seek out to resist tyranny, infidelity, incest, snitching, domination of other poor souls, rebellion and drunkenness. I'm left sad after reading it and also suspicious of everyone I see. She's not a Nobel Laureate for nothing.
patchy_at_best's review against another edition
4.0
Nobel Prize winner, [a:Herta Müller|134980|Herta Müller|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1434721410p2/134980.jpg], writes about life in Romania during Nicolae Ceausescu's totalitarian regime. I expected a story of isolation and suffering; instead, The Appointment weaves poetry from pain and beauty from the mundane.
An unnamed seamstress is indicted by Ceausescu's secret police on a false charge of prostitution. The tram ride to her interrogation gives her time to reflect on her life, especially her relationships with friends and family. The stream of consciousness structure revisits key moments from her past in no particular order, the way your mind wanders on a long journey.
The Appointment's unnamed narrator has a sense of humour that made me respect her resilience instead of pity her. Behind a what-doesn't-kill-you-makes-you-stronger façade, she is extremely self-aware. Her descriptions of people and places are often lyrical and always articulate, seeing past the surface to question the hidden purpose. I thought she seemed untouchable - as if even the most terrible consequence couldn't crush her soul. This effect could easily be interpreted as a coping mechanism developed from her past trauma. She is a brilliant choice of eyes through which to study life under dictatorship.
The above quote stood out to me as a brilliant metaphor for the main themes of The Appointment. The narrator's memories repeatedly depict families protecting and hurting one another; love and pain go hand-in-hand in her experience. This inevitably results in toxic gender politics: for example, many male characters feel justified cheating on or beating their wives. In a poverty-stricken place where people must be mistrustful and selfish in order to survive, the narrator notices how people are bound to their family for better or for worse. In The Appointment, painful relationships are often the only thing people have left to count on.
This book easily deserves five stars for literary merit. As a Nobel Prize winner, Müller exacts careful control of her pacing, plot development, and choice of poetic language. The narrative is stripped bare of inverted commas, question marks, and chapter breaks. I liked how this minimalistic format meant there were no distractions from the story.
I chose to give The Appointment four stars because I found the slow pace regularly lost my attention. I wonder if I could have avoided this issue by reading it quicker instead of over a couple of weeks. That said, the narrator's voice is beautifully developed and engaging. You could even argue that the slow pace is a metaphor for the maddening process of the narrator's indictment; the secret police appear to be trying to drive her to breaking point.
The Appointment is a brilliant, readable representation of life under dictatorship. Müller takes care to show the many facets of her experience living under Ceausescu's regime, surprising readers with humour and beauty alongside tragedy. Her unnamed narrator has a memorable voice that will live on inside my head and haunt me with eloquent quotes.
This review can also be found on my blog Paige's Pages.
An unnamed seamstress is indicted by Ceausescu's secret police on a false charge of prostitution. The tram ride to her interrogation gives her time to reflect on her life, especially her relationships with friends and family. The stream of consciousness structure revisits key moments from her past in no particular order, the way your mind wanders on a long journey.
The worst thing is this feeling that my brain is slipping down into my face. It's humiliating, there's no other word for it, when your whole body feels like it's barefoot. But what if there aren't any words at all, what if even the best word isn't enough - page 4
The Appointment's unnamed narrator has a sense of humour that made me respect her resilience instead of pity her. Behind a what-doesn't-kill-you-makes-you-stronger façade, she is extremely self-aware. Her descriptions of people and places are often lyrical and always articulate, seeing past the surface to question the hidden purpose. I thought she seemed untouchable - as if even the most terrible consequence couldn't crush her soul. This effect could easily be interpreted as a coping mechanism developed from her past trauma. She is a brilliant choice of eyes through which to study life under dictatorship.
There aren't enough trees around to make a single coffin - you'll have to be mine and I'll be yours - page 175
The above quote stood out to me as a brilliant metaphor for the main themes of The Appointment. The narrator's memories repeatedly depict families protecting and hurting one another; love and pain go hand-in-hand in her experience. This inevitably results in toxic gender politics: for example, many male characters feel justified cheating on or beating their wives. In a poverty-stricken place where people must be mistrustful and selfish in order to survive, the narrator notices how people are bound to their family for better or for worse. In The Appointment, painful relationships are often the only thing people have left to count on.
This book easily deserves five stars for literary merit. As a Nobel Prize winner, Müller exacts careful control of her pacing, plot development, and choice of poetic language. The narrative is stripped bare of inverted commas, question marks, and chapter breaks. I liked how this minimalistic format meant there were no distractions from the story.
I chose to give The Appointment four stars because I found the slow pace regularly lost my attention. I wonder if I could have avoided this issue by reading it quicker instead of over a couple of weeks. That said, the narrator's voice is beautifully developed and engaging. You could even argue that the slow pace is a metaphor for the maddening process of the narrator's indictment; the secret police appear to be trying to drive her to breaking point.
The Appointment is a brilliant, readable representation of life under dictatorship. Müller takes care to show the many facets of her experience living under Ceausescu's regime, surprising readers with humour and beauty alongside tragedy. Her unnamed narrator has a memorable voice that will live on inside my head and haunt me with eloquent quotes.
This review can also be found on my blog Paige's Pages.
arriaviderci's review against another edition
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.5
shewritesinmargins's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
4.0
deea_bks's review against another edition
5.0
There is a shocking matter of factness in the voice addressing to the readers of this book. Belonging to the female character in the center of the story, it weaves the narration by adding together episodes full of horror from a past under communism (her grandmother's death, her father's adultery, her father-in-law's acts of violence, Lilli's sexual misbehavior and death), details regarding a present ride by tram to the police office for interrogations and random descriptions of objects.
How is it to feel that everything surrounding you is spying on you? Innanimate objects get personified around and these, together with people surrounding you (among whom most act crazy if they are not crazy already) seem to take part in a conspiratory whirlpool which has in the center your life. Everything becomes part of this cycle and the repetition and dullness of everyday events scare the hell out of you. Everything seems to be an enemy, everyone and everything seem to be plotting against you, even the lifeless objects in their silence seem to whisper against you. Everything suggests the feeling that someone is watching you and is going to inform on you to the secret police under the Romanian communist regime led by Ceausescu. Stricken with constant fear and with the feeling that senselessness is easier to handle than the aimlessness of the everyday events, the main character constantly gives an answer to the question pointed above which Herta Muller seems to make a whole theme out of in this book ("How is it to feel that everything surrounding you is spying on you?"). The sessions of interrogations and her fear of being summoned become the major events of her present summing up a centerfold around which her whole life revolves.
In such an atmosphere, it becomes impossible to grasp who you are anymore and what your principles really are: "it's easy to talk about bad years if they are past. But when you have to say right who you are at this very moment, it's hard to get more out than an uneasy silence". Everybody informs on everybody and trust becomes a liability: trusting means getting betrayed eventually. The past brings up its examples of this statement: people who should be trusted in life, in general, are actually great deceivers in the main character's life (her father, her step-father) and the ones that she actually trusts have however, an uncertain status. I can only interpret the open-ending taking this last phrase into account: everything is uncertain (is Paul an enemy or a friend, does he love her or does he mislead her, does he tell her the truth or everything regarding him is a big lie?) and the character doesn't know whom she can trust anymore. "The trick is not to go mad." But how can you keep your mind in its right place when you are estranged in a world where values are fighting to convey a meaning that is totally opposite to the main one and everyone seems to consider this normal? How are you to fight with mad people in a world where everybody is mad and you are the only one who is different?
The result is that in such a world you begin to become suspicious of everyone and value things which in normal societies you would take for granted: the fact that your body is whole and that all its parts are functional, that you have all the fingers, for instance, and that you can use them: "Ever since I found the parcel wrapped like candy in my bag (she talks about a human finger she found in her bag after one of the sessions of interrogation), I use my forefinger (when she is making sketches), crooking and twisting it to follow the contours. I didn't check whether the severed finger could be bent."
This book is splendid: full of meanings and conveying ideas without pointing them out. I relished its phrases and I read the most striking ones twice or even more times. They kept me pondering about the obscurity of communism and on how the terror turned people into beasts. They made me wonder if I had any right to blame nowadays people for still wearing their scars of the communism as they still do and this question will keep me wondering for quite a while.
On another note, I really enjoyed the review from the link below, although I don't agree with the ending:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/21/books/betrayal-as-a-way-of-life.html
How is it to feel that everything surrounding you is spying on you? Innanimate objects get personified around and these, together with people surrounding you (among whom most act crazy if they are not crazy already) seem to take part in a conspiratory whirlpool which has in the center your life. Everything becomes part of this cycle and the repetition and dullness of everyday events scare the hell out of you. Everything seems to be an enemy, everyone and everything seem to be plotting against you, even the lifeless objects in their silence seem to whisper against you. Everything suggests the feeling that someone is watching you and is going to inform on you to the secret police under the Romanian communist regime led by Ceausescu. Stricken with constant fear and with the feeling that senselessness is easier to handle than the aimlessness of the everyday events, the main character constantly gives an answer to the question pointed above which Herta Muller seems to make a whole theme out of in this book ("How is it to feel that everything surrounding you is spying on you?"). The sessions of interrogations and her fear of being summoned become the major events of her present summing up a centerfold around which her whole life revolves.
In such an atmosphere, it becomes impossible to grasp who you are anymore and what your principles really are: "it's easy to talk about bad years if they are past. But when you have to say right who you are at this very moment, it's hard to get more out than an uneasy silence". Everybody informs on everybody and trust becomes a liability: trusting means getting betrayed eventually. The past brings up its examples of this statement: people who should be trusted in life, in general, are actually great deceivers in the main character's life (her father, her step-father) and the ones that she actually trusts have however, an uncertain status. I can only interpret the open-ending taking this last phrase into account: everything is uncertain (is Paul an enemy or a friend, does he love her or does he mislead her, does he tell her the truth or everything regarding him is a big lie?) and the character doesn't know whom she can trust anymore. "The trick is not to go mad." But how can you keep your mind in its right place when you are estranged in a world where values are fighting to convey a meaning that is totally opposite to the main one and everyone seems to consider this normal? How are you to fight with mad people in a world where everybody is mad and you are the only one who is different?
The result is that in such a world you begin to become suspicious of everyone and value things which in normal societies you would take for granted: the fact that your body is whole and that all its parts are functional, that you have all the fingers, for instance, and that you can use them: "Ever since I found the parcel wrapped like candy in my bag (she talks about a human finger she found in her bag after one of the sessions of interrogation), I use my forefinger (when she is making sketches), crooking and twisting it to follow the contours. I didn't check whether the severed finger could be bent."
This book is splendid: full of meanings and conveying ideas without pointing them out. I relished its phrases and I read the most striking ones twice or even more times. They kept me pondering about the obscurity of communism and on how the terror turned people into beasts. They made me wonder if I had any right to blame nowadays people for still wearing their scars of the communism as they still do and this question will keep me wondering for quite a while.
On another note, I really enjoyed the review from the link below, although I don't agree with the ending:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/21/books/betrayal-as-a-way-of-life.html
kingkong's review against another edition
3.0
I know living under Cousceaus must have sucked and her best friend got shot and her husband is a drunk but does she have to whine so much about