The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Nadirs, by Herta Müller
reviewed by Brian Budzynski

Trans. and afterword by Sieglinde Lug. Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1999. 122 pp. Paper: $13.00.

Biographical fiction has grown more popular as of late, and an unfortunate effect of this has been a return to the Dickensian method of storytelling: detail the reader to death. Nadirs quietly defies this trend with prose whose power manifests itself in the psychological observations of its author/narrator. This slim collection of fifteen stories traces Müller’s childhood in the slums of Romania, each story focusing on an impressionable event. Müller creates a singular voice that is both brutally honest and dreadfully sad. The observations are made with fearless simplicity, making the acrimonious verbal assaults of the adult family members conspicuous and as painful to the reader as they would be to a child. The title story describes the days leading up to death of the narrator’s father in a town where “happiness bites off . . . heads from time to time.” With a child’s eye, both plain and genuine, the small, poor farming village becomes the whole world, in all its darkness and wonder. Inked with the subtlety of a Seurat painting, the environment is clearly stronger than the people—“The twigs are pushing out of the ditch, they end in long sharp thorns and get twisted in their search for light”—and the characters are at the mercy of circumstance. The idea of change or escape is doused with spousal abuse and petty thievery.

Owing gratitude to Lug’s splendid translation, Nadirs is a grave, yet compellingly told series of vignettes which should force readers to look as much within themselves as within the text.