Synopses & Reviews
“Splendid and absorbing . . . [Drndic] is writing to witness, and to make the pain stick . . . These dense and satisfying pages capture the crowdedness of memory.” — New York Times Book Review
Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, in northeastern Italy, surrounded by a basket of photographs and newspaper clippings. Now an old woman, she waits to be reunited after sixty-two years with her son, fathered by an SS officer and stolen from her by the German authorities as part of Himmler’s clandestine Lebensborn project.
Haya reflects on her Catholicized Jewish family’s experiences, in a narrative that deals unsparingly with the massacre of Italian Jews in the concentration camps of Trieste. Her obsessive search for her son leads her to photographs, maps, and fragments of verse, to testimonies from the Nuremberg trials and interviews with second-generation Jews, and to eyewitness accounts of atrocities that took place on her doorstep. From this broad collage of material and memory arises the staggering chronicle of Nazi occupation in northern Italy.
“Although this is fiction, it is also a deeply researched historical documentary . . . It is a masterpiece.” — A. N. Wilson, Financial Times
“A book of events that have made the last century infamous for the ages, a book that, if it moves you as it moved me, you will have to set down now and then, to breathe." — Alan Cheuse, NPR
Review
“Unflinching. . . Ms. Müllers vision of a police state manned by plum thieves reads like a kind of fairy tale on the mingled evils of gluttony, stupidity and brutality.”—
The New York Times Book Review“Müller has triumphed in her honesty, and The Land of Green Plums is her testimony. . . .Describes in precisely hewn detail what is was like to live in Romania under communism.”—The Washington Post
“Ms. Müllers rich, harsh, obsessive imagery captures the surreal beauty and the difficulty of Ceausescu-era Romania.”—The Boston Book Review “This heartbreaking tale is bitter and dark, yet beautiful. . . Stark and telling.”—San Diego Union-Tribune
“The Land of Green Plums works hauntingly, disturbingly well.”—The Guardian (UK) “Impressive, wholly authentic. . . a bleak fable with the flickering intensity of a nightmare.”—International Herald Tribune “This is a novel of strong, spare poetry in translation. Again and again, its speech startles. Then it quickly sounds just right, and it becomes hard to imagine there might not have been a Herta Müller to transcribe these urgent whispers.”—The Australian “By paying careful attention to the slightest nuances of life in Romania the book gives an accurate description of what it was like to be alive anywhere in Eastern Europe during the years of communism. . . Müller has triumphed in her honesty and The Land of Green Plums is her testimony.”—The Washington Times
Review
Praise for José Saramago and Raised from the Ground "Essential...A novel that resounds with relevance for our own time." —New York Times Book Review "A beautifully written epic...Raised from the Ground presents a breathtaking view of this momentous period in Portugal's history." —Daily Beast "Drawn from the experiences of the author's own ancestors, the novel is sustained by Saramago's rich descriptions, which can capture a span of time in a single image...or telescope a moment into a mystical event." —The New Yorker "A fascinating, personal portrait of a nation and its people…A great example of Saramagos distinct voice and style, famous for its insightfulness and inventiveness and keen use of parable and irony." —Real Simple "Saramago is arguably the greatest writer of our time." —Chicago Tribune "A beautifully modulated performance, juxtaposing scenes of great, often tender lyrical beauty with scenes of violence and despair…Raised from the Ground resonates powerfully as a personal statement of beliefs." —Richmond Times-Dispatch "In the case of the Portuguese writer José Saramago, the Nobel Committee got it right for once." —The Seattle Times "It isnt Saramagos political pessimism that makes him a great novelist, although one may well share it. Its his profligate interest in life, his storytellers joy with words, his understanding that the realms of experience and ideas need not be separate, his belief in the possibility of finding love and changing your life at any age, his lyricism on such subjects as food and sleep, his undiluted affection for all his characters." —Salon.com "Reading the Portuguese writer José Saramago, one quickly senses the presence of a master." —The Christian Science Monitor "A masterly piece of work, beautifully shaped and composed and emotionally affecting… Saramago doesnt demand that readers weep for his characters. He just demands respect for their quiet lives and limited possibilities." —The Onions A.V. Club "[Saramagos] narrative voice is unmistakable: a mature, quiet voice, conversational and easy, often ironical or endearingly humorous, that flows forward always weaving and interbraiding with itself, wandering but never losing impetus, like a big river running through a dry land." —Ursula K. LeGuin, The Guardian "Hypnotic, lyrical and dynamic…Raised from the Ground is a lovely and fascinating read, fiction of the highest order." —Toronto Star "Saramago seamlessly juxtaposes bleak realism and fanciful folklore as only someone who lived the harshest of reality can dare… Sometimes it is delivered with great wisdom, and other times, unexpectedly, with humor, yet all Saramagos prose is rendered without any sense of distance from the characters he has created." —The Post and Courier "Saramago's poetic and political fans of the English-speaking world will unite in appreciation for this long-awaited translation." —Booklist
Synopsis
Set in Romania at the height of Ceauescu's reign of terror,
The Land of Green Plums tells the story of a group of young people who leave the impoverished province for the city in search of better prospects and camaraderie. But their hopes are ravaged, because the city, no less than the countryside, bears everywhere the mark of the dictatorship's corrosive touch. All the narrator's friends—teachers and students of vaguely dissident allegiance—betray her, do away with themselves, or both. As they do so, we see the way the totalitarian state comes to inhabit every human realm and how everyone, even the strongest, must either bend to the oppressors or resist them and thereby perish.
Herta Müller, herself a survivor of Ceausescu's police state, speaks from intimate experience. Scene by scene, in language at once harsh and poetic, she constructs a devastating picture of a society and a generation ruined by fear. In simple images of hieroglyphic power—policeman filling their pockets and mouths with green plums; girls sleeping with abattoir workers for bags of offal; a docile proletariat making things no one wants—"tin sheep and wooden watermelons"—Müller anatomizes a country and its citizens and the corruption that has rotted the core of both.
Synopsis
A multi-generational family saga that paints a sweeping portrait of modern Portuguese political history.
Synopsis
"
Essential...A novel that resounds with relevance for our own time." —New York Times Book Review First published in 1980, the City of Lisbon Prize-winning
Raised from the Ground follows the changing fortunes of the Mau Tempo family—poor landless peasants not unlike Saramagos own grandparents. Set in Alentejo, a southern province of Portugal known for its vast agricultural estates, the novel charts the lives of the Mau Tempos as national and international events rumble on in the background—the coming of the republic in Portugual, the two world wars, and an attempt on the dictator Salazars life. Yet nothing really impinges on the grim reality of the farm laborers lives until the first communist stirrings.
Raised from the Ground is Saramagos most deeply personal novel, the book in which he found the signature style and voice that distinguishes all of his brilliant works.
Synopsis
"A masterpiece" (A.N. Wilson), this many-layered novel of WWII combines fiction with a Sebaldian collage of facts to explore the fate of Italian Jews under Nazi occupation, through the intimate story of a mother's search for her son.
Synopsis
“A work of European high culture . . . even at their most lurid, Drndic’s sentences remain coldly dignified. And so does Ellen Elias-Bursac’s imperturbably elegant translation.” — New York Times Book Review “Trieste is an exceptional reading experience and an early contender for book of the year.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune
Haya Tedeschi sits alone in Gorizia, in northeastern Italy, surrounded by a basket of photographs and newspaper clippings. Now an old woman, she waits to be reunited after sixty-two years with her son, fathered by an SS officer and stolen from her by the German authorities as part of Himmler’s clandestine Lebensborn project.
Haya reflects on her Catholicized Jewish family’s experiences, dealing unsparingly with the massacre of Italian Jews in the concentration camps of Trieste. Her obsessive search for her son leads her to photographs, maps, and fragments of verse, to testimonies from the Nuremberg trials and interviews with second-generation Jews, and to eyewitness accounts of atrocities that took place on her doorstep. From this broad collage of material and memory arises the staggering chronicle of Nazi occupation in northern Italy.
About the Author
JOSÉ SARAMAGO (1922–2010) was the author of many novels, among them Blindness, All the Names, Baltasar and Blimunda, and The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. In 1998 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
MARGARET JULL COSTA has established herself as the premier translator of Portuguese literature into English today.