The Appointment: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: beautifully fragmented
Review: Beautifully written prose and an incredibly fitting cover photo, this is a fictional account of a Romanian factory worker punished for pinning notes into the pockets of outgoing clothing.

This 'why' quickly takes a back seat to the out-of-sequence internal flashbacks that slowly reveal most of her adult life and routine. Told in a manner both simple and complex, it's not unlike a self-confession, and in this I think it makes its mark. The goings-on of the particular appointment doesn't seem, at the end to matter, for as the speaker tells us, "The trick is not to go mad."

Rating:
Summary: Too Impressionistic and Internal
Review: I must confess that I only read this novel because it was by a Romanian author, and I had never read anything by a Romanian before. The story is nominally about a woman in an unnamed Eastern European country who has run afoul of the authorities and must report for questioning periodically. On her way to one such "appointment," she recounts her past (and though it the oppressive conditions of trying to simply stay sane while living in an authoritarian state) via a series of jumbled flashbacks. The flashbacks veer all over, from the deeds that landed her in trouble, to her first marriage, to her adulterous father, to a beautiful friend shot trying to flee the country, to past interrogations, and most compellingly, to her current relationship with an alcoholic and it's birth in a flea market where she was trying sell her wedding ring. While these sound interesting, their actual presentation in the book is too impressionistic and internal to really grab the reader. As Muller herself was the harassed by Ceausescu's secret police until her flight, the bitterness and hopelessness of it all rings particularly true. That said, the book doesn't really do much other than show the reader the bleakness of communist Romania, which doesn't seem particularly different from that of many other authoritarian regimes. It's certainly not a fun read (not that books need to be easy or fun reads), nor one I would recommend to anyone without a particular abiding interest in Romania.

Rating:
Summary: Stylistic Account of Life In Communist Romania
Review: Well, I might be in a minority here, but I truly enjoyed the book. True, it didn't follow a strict linear format, but then, neither did the protagonist's life ... I thought this one was more clear than her previous book, "The Land of Green Plums." Recommended.