The-Land-of-Green-Plums
1998 Winner

The Land of Green Plums

Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann
artwork-image

ABOUT
THE BOOK

The novel brilliantly evokes a world of cruelty and oppression. Set in Communist Romania under the Ceaucescu dictatorship, The Land of Green Plums portrays the lives of a group of dissident students and teachers whose integrity is continuously assailed and sometimes betrayed. Herta Müller’s stark and vivid prose explores a terror-stricken society of mendacity and political slander. The “green plums” of the title stand in part for truth and its brutal suppression in a world of interrogators and informers, where speaking out can become a matter of life and death.

The author’s style, achieves a spartan eloquence, and the novel’s individual charaters are powerfully drawn.

This elegantly understated book is at once bleak and beautiful, humorous and heartbreaking. The judges congratulate Herta Müller for her compelling literary achievement in The Land of Green Plums.

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.

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR Herta
Müller

Herta Müller is the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as the 1998 International Dublin Literary Award and the European Literature Prize. She is the author of, among other books, The Hunger Angel and The Land of Green Plums. Born in Romania in 1953, Müller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceausescu’s secret police. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin.

Herta Müller is the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as the 1998 International Dublin Literary Award and the European Literature Prize. She is the author of, among other books, The Hunger Angel and The Land of Green Plums. Born in Romania in 1953, Müller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceausescu’s secret police. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin.

ABOUT
THE TRANSLATOR Michael
Hofmann

Michael Hofmann is a German-born, British-educated poet, translator, and critic. The author of five books of poems, he has translated some hundred titles from the German. His translations have won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the 2024 International Booker Prize. He teaches at the University of Florida. (from New York Review)

Michael Hofmann is a German-born, British-educated poet, translator, and critic. The author of five books of poems, he has translated some hundred titles from the German. His translations have won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the 2024 International Booker Prize. He teaches at the University of Florida. (from New York Review)

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Date published
01/01/1994
Country
Germany, Romania
Original Language
German
Author
Publisher
Henry Holt
Translator
Michael Hofmann
Translation
Translated from the German by Michael Hofmann

RELATED FEATURES

News January 15 2025

2025 Longlist Revealed

Novels by seven Irish authors are among the 71 books nominated by 83 libraries around the world!
News November 19 2024

2025 Dublin Literary Award Judges Announced

Meet our judging panel for 2025 Dublin Literary Award
Video November 1 2024

2024 Dublin Literary Award Ceremony

2024 Dublin Literary Award Ceremony announcement live-streamed from the International Literature Festival Dublin.
Audio June 11 2024

All About Books Podcast Features the 2024 Dublin Literary Award

Dublin City FM podcaster Katy Conneely spotlights the award.

STAY CONNECTED

Stay in touch and sign up to our newsletter to receive all the latest news and updates on the Dublin Literary Award.