The Village on the Edge of the World

Writing and Surviving Ceausescu's Romania

Herta Müller

A Nobel laureate presents a brilliant, discomfiting reflection on literary life defined by the brutality of Ceausescu’s Romania.

From her childhood in Romania, in a village “as small as a thimble on the edge of the world,” through to life in exile in Germany, Herta Müller's story unspools against the tumultuous history of Romania in the latter half of the twentieth century. Here, the Nobel Prize laureate reflects on cultural history, memory, and trauma, and on what it was to live and write under Ceausescu's regime. She revisits the friendships that buckled under the weight of fear and paranoia; the experience of being surveilled and interrogated; and on the unique blend of fear and tedium borne through life under totalitarianism.

The Village on the Edge of the World is a book that chronicles the minutiae of life under both fascism and the Soviet Union, while charting the existential questions posed by these regimes of the twentieth century—and how they remain with us in the twenty-first. This is a powerful and evocative reflection on life behind the Iron Curtain.

Herta Müller was born on August 17, 1953 in Banat, Romania. In 1987, she emigrated to Germany and has lived in Berlin ever since. She is the author of The Land of Green Plums, The Appointment, The Hunger Angel, and The Fox Was Ever the Hunter, among other works. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009.

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Endorsements & Reviews

Praise for Herta Müller:

“With the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, Müller depicts the language of the dispossessed.” Jury of the Nobel Prize for Literature

“A dark collage, which glints with fear—and with beauty . . . Müller’s prose—as poetic as it is blunt—works like a prism, shattering and illuminating a world that is always watching, waiting.” The Atlantic

“Perhaps no author has captured the surreal textures of Iron Curtain paranoia quite like Herta Müller.” Vogue.com (Best Books of the Month)

“Nobody since Arthur Koestler in the 1940s has written more intelligently or with such subtle precision about life under totalitarianism… Müller has an exceptionally rare talent—to turn the terrifying, the distorted and the hideously ugly into something uplifting and beautiful.” Prospect Magazine

“Herta Müller is a passionate artist of protest.” Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

“Müller scatters narrative bombshells across a field of dreams.” San Francisco Chronicle

“Herta Müller is a writer who releases great emotional power through a highly sophisticated, image studded, and often expressionistic prose.” Neal Ascherson, The New York Review of Books

“Especially now, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it's a beautiful signal that such high quality literature and this life experience are being honoured.” Angela Merkel

“Remarkable . . . The Fox draws on what she suffered while clenched in the jaws of one of history’s most notorious dictatorships. But she infuses characters and events with surreal elements and heightened levels of metaphor that make this much more than a roman à clef. . . . Here, dreams become extensions of life, or life itself is a dream; they are cut, at any rate, from one and the same fabric, consistently lurid and terrifying.” NPR

“Of the writers to survive life under the Communist bloc, Müller has written most poignantly about the way surveillance and state control at once necessitated and warped the fabric of love. . . . From the moment she left, Müller has exercised her voice with a fury that vibrates off the page nearly a quarter century later.” The Boston Globe