Herta Müller; trans. Philip Boehm
Translated by Philip Boehm, The Hunger Angel by the 2009 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Herta Müller, captures in minute detail the horrors of life in a Soviet Union labor camp in 1945. Her novel is based on the true story of Oskar Pastior, a poet who survived the labor camp and described his experiences to her.
The novel opens when Leo Auberg, an ethnic German, is deported from his home in Romania and transported to a labor camp in the Soviet Union where he spends the next five years. Leo is an astute observer of human behavior. He chronicles in painstaking, minute detail his life and work in the camp. The smallest, most mundane tasks assume huge significance. Leo doesn’t just shovel coal. He describes the different types of coal and explains how to shovel each type in meticulous detail. He has an ongoing battle with cement. He provides step-by-step instructions on the best way to carry cinder blocks. He communes with insects. He flashes back to incidents in his past and hallucinates about flying home on a pig. He lists the different types of lice feeding on his body and the bed bugs that plague him at night. And threaded throughout every aspect of his life and activities is the hunger angel.
Hunger is personified in relentless detail. It permeates every aspect of Leo’s life. He calculates each load he shovels earns him 1 gram of bread. He chews his food, spits it out, and hides it to savor it later in the day. He exchanges pieces of bread with is fellow inmates, always suspecting they came out ahead. He rummages through garbage to eat potato peels and anything else he can forage. He goes to the village to exchange bits and pieces of his meager belongings in exchange for food. He avoids looking in a mirror because he feels ashamed of the skeletal appearance he has in common with his inmates. The images and the insatiable hunger continue to plague Leo for decades. Even decades after leaving the camp, he feels a social misfit and is unable to quell the constant feeling of hunger.
The novel is in short chapters with headings that enumerate Leo’s musings and the mundane objects which assume major significance in his life. Told in simple, almost lyrical prose, the accumulation of minute details and litany of daily activities convey an authentic picture of what life must have been like in a forced labor camp.
This is not an easy book to read. It is, however, a powerful and compelling narrative illustrating man’s inhumanity to man packaged in the words of a very talented writer.