Short stories
Nadirs
Niederungen
Herta Müller · 1982
Synopsis
A little girl grows up in a German-speaking village in western Romania, in a house where three generations live. In the longest of the stories, she tells of the daily life of the village and the game in which, with her little neighbour, she plays at being a grown-up. Other stories follow a funeral oration dreamed up for a father who has deaths on his conscience, a bath in which three generations wash in the same water, a family in which the fathers are not the children's fathers, a journey into the mountains to sell tomatoes.
Context
The book appeared in 1982 in Bucharest, from Kriterion, in a censored version, and the same year received the prize of the communist youth union and the first-book prize of the Romanian writers' union. In 1984, the Rotbuch Verlag of West Berlin published a revised version of sixteen stories, taken in part from a second collection. The title, taken from the main story, also denotes the moral baseness of the villagers. An extract published in 1981 in a Timișoara daily had already aroused the anger of part of the Banat Swabians, who saw in the book a betrayal of their own people.
Who it is for
Short stories, and one longer piece of about eighty pages, all seen from childhood.
Prizes and reception
Its author's first book, translated into English in 1999 and into French in 2015; adapted for the stage in Timișoara in 2012.