Name: Herta Müller
Year Won: 2009
Read: The Hunger Angel
Original Language: German
Reason: "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed"
About: The Hunger Angel is about a man in a Soviet Prisoner of war camp. He shovels stuff. He starves. It's bleak.
What I liked: Beautiful descriptions of a miserable and hopeless situation. There's also some rather interesting stuff regarding the protagonist's family, which were Nazi's once.
What I Disliked: There's really no plot. The protagonist suffers. He continues to suffer. That is his lot.
I also found some of the stuff to feel sort of surreal in a bad way. Like, the prisoners apparently trade bread every night for...*reasons*? It was weird and baffling and took away from the stark misery of it all.
Should it have won a Nobel: This hit me harder than most. The writing is brilliant and it feels important. So sure.
Next Up: "Aunt Julia and the Script Writer" by Mario Vargas Llosa
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