Book Review | A Woman, Three Men and the Search for Home
Nobel laureate Herta Müller’s work is not driven by plot
A rational, intelligent, rather hard-headed Irene has three romantic interests in this short novel. These are hot and dissolute Franz, boring but stable Stefan and Thomas who is mostly gay. Who loves her? Who attracts her most strongly? Whom does she end up with? These questions as well as the nature and specifics of her relationships with each of them are the main draw of the novel.
Just like its author, Herta Müller, though, Irene is a Romanian-born ethnic German and has emigrated to West Germany. In Romania, the reasons for a person's misery are always clear and structural — fear, starvation, oppression. In Germany, she cannot understand how people can be so unhappy when they have total freedom, making her, a ‘double outsider’, feel even more disconnected.
The book is also about a woman’s unique loneliness, about how one feels after being masturbated at on a sea beach, is stalked and is nonchalant, or is unable find an appropriate box when asked to check them during an interview upon entering Germany. “Sometimes the city attacked her thoughts. Sometimes her thoughts attacked the city.”
Pertinently, it is not about intersectionality between femininity and disability; the title ‘Traveling on One Leg’ refers to one leg of a journey. She believes she is not destined to travel the return leg.
Now this is the kind of book where the importance of the story or plot is secondary. And it cannot be successfully adapted to film without loss of meaning. Much of it is open to interpretation, like abstract art or an expressionist painting, changing depending on the reader’s life experience and understanding. But man, is it satisfying. Indeed, it gives to you what cinema cannot. A window into your inner life.
Müller uses a distinctive, non-realist literary style to turn emotional truths and intellectual struggles into art rather than focus on actual events. Indeed, rather than being a metaphor for these, her surrealism is filtered through the lens of feeling. The gravity of the issues she tackles (capitalism vs communism, alienation following forced migration, et al.) informs it. In that sense, it is a hard book.
“I know you can forget whole books,” Müller who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009 writes on page 85 of her novel. “Only individual, audacious sentences are left over. They belong to you as if your own experience had whispered them to you in a railway station. As if they come to your mind against your will.”
That audacity is perhaps the secret behind the absurd beauty of this book.
Traveling on One Leg
By Herta Müller
Aleph
pp. 154; Rs 599