It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a Gulag camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless hunger in a world where one shovel load of coal is worth one gram of bread.
In this 2009 novel, Nobel Laureate Herta Müller conjures the distorted world of the Soviet labor camp in all its physical and moral absurdity with poetic intensity and dispassionate precision. *The Hunger Angel* was based upon the based on the true story of the poet Oskar Pastior, who died before it was published.
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17-year-old Romanian Leo Auberg is sent off to a Russian labour camp with a gramophone case filled with poetry, aftershave, socks and a silk scarf. He will spend 5 years shovelling coal, lugging cement and pitching slag armed only with the words of his grandmother “I know you'll come back.”
The book is comprised of short chapters recounting aspects of Leo's life in the gulag. It is filled with oblique details that reveal Herta Muller's long correspondence with poet Oskar Pastior who endured 5 years in a Soviet Labor Camp. This isn't misery porn, some grandiose statement of suffering - it's more precise than that and all the more pervasive.
There's the cheek-bread, so named for the white hunger-fur that appears before death that reveals bartering for food is wasted on them. The nightly exchange of bread and the curse of your ever shrinking exchanges. Trading 50 pages of Nietzsche's Zarathustra cigarette paper for 1 measure of salt. The ridiculous image of the cuckoo-less cuckoo clock - the mechanism reduced to a small piece of rubber, like an earthworm that vibrated with a pitiful rattling noise as it called the hour. And the hunger angel. Even sixty years since his release from the camp, Leo can't escape the memory of the hunger angel — is still locked up inside the taste of eating, that he is still eating against starvation.
Interesting to talk to someone who read it in German and the poetry of the original language. Credit to translator Philip Boehm for his word choice as much of it is still retained in the English translation. Some subtlety is inevitably lost in hunger angel, breath swing, heart shovel and hase-vey but I appreciated the distinct word construction.
