Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Brilliant. A heart-breaking and thought-provoking novel., 27 April 2000
By A Customer
Herta Muller uses delicate imagaery (factory workers making 'tin sheep and wooden melons') to convey the quiet desperation lurking behind the fake, fixed smiles of ordinary citizens in the police state of communist Romania. The narrator leaves her poor country village to go to the city, where she hopes to find some meaning in her life. Instead she finds that no matter how hard she tries, she cannot stop the fear and despair that comes to infiltrate her every waking moment ('In this county, we had to walk, eat, sleep and love in fear'). Muller wonderfully evokes the harsh reality of the totalitarian state were, in having their freedom and ability to make their own choices taken away from them, human beings are reduced to zombies. A bleak and heart-rending story, but one which nonetheless has to be told.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Beautiful... Astonishing, 21 May 1998
By A Customer
This novel is one of the most powerful ones I have ever read. The author has a wonderful way of making us feel for the characters, and it is written in such a compassionate and moving way. This is right up there on my list of great books along with Byatt's Possession and another book that reminded me of this one: The God of Small Things.
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5 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Poor, 9 Sep 2002
Prose that the author uses is very poor and leaves the reader disengaged with the subject she is trying to portray. Very simplistic, if not deceiving, portrait of life in Communist Romania with too much sympathy for the plight of the author herself rather than a rational description of people's lives. Found the use of methaphors and repeating images (workers drinkig blood) rather pointless particularly in the serious context that the author is trying to give to her book. Very fastidious altogether.
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