20 Nov 2012 00:49:52
n the 1940s, Romanian Germans were ordered to help restore a damaged Soviet Union in labour camps, the theme taken by 2009 Nobel laureate Herta Müller in her latest novel, The Hunger Angel. Müller draws on interviews with survivors of the gulag to create the fictional Leo – 17, gay, and initially embracing this forced departure from his "thimble of a town". There his optimism is quickly crushed by a hunger so desperate that it transforms him in both the short and long term.
Hunger first obsesses Leo (as he sleeps, "I eat wedding soup and bread, stuffed peppers and bread. Then I wake up in the barrack…and peer at the shortsighted light bulb") and gradually erases his sense of self.
Leo becomes defined by the details – the coal with which he works, the objects he packs in his gramophone case , including wool socks and a copy of Faust – but by nothing more so than hunger, whose presence lasts way beyond his exit from the Gulag: "To this day I have to show hunger that I escaped his grasp… I literally eat life itself." The effects of working in a camp, decades on, are irreversible: "The camp let me go home only to create the space it needed to grow inside my head."
Müller takes an important look at one of the 20th century's lesser known persecutions and paints a bleak portrait of life inside Stalin's labour camps. The flagrant monotony and misery of camp life provide a moving account of Leo's experience.
