THE HUNGER ANGEL - Rare Fine Copy of The First American Edition/First Printing: Signed by Herta Muller - SIGNED ON THE TITLE PAGE

Muller, Herta; Mueller, Herta (Author) & Boehm, Philip (Translator)

ISBN 10: 080509301X / ISBN 13: 9780805093018

Published by New York City, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2012, 2012

About this Item

1st Printing. Signed. 292 pages. Published in 2012. The author's fifth novel to be translated into English. Now considered a contemporary classic. The first appearance of the title in English and in the United States. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Herta Muller's "Atemschaukel" in a felicitous English translation by Philip Boehm. Life in a concentration camp. It is told in a profoundly personal voice by its 17-year-old protagonist, Leo Auberg, in sixty-four impressionistic chapters. Auberg thereby reminds us of a now-forgotten historical fact: "None of us were part of any war, but because we were Germans, the Russians considered us guilty of Hitler's crimes". In one sentence, he sums up how millions of ethnic Germans living in Eastern Europe were either displaced, killed, or sent to Soviet camps after the Second World War. As always with Muller, the bleakness is made somehow bearable by flashes of wit, irony, and humor. Regarded as a national icon in Germany, "a living Goethe" (rhymes with Herta), Muller was awarded the Nobel Prize on the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of Communism: "The Committee has recognized an author who refuses to let the inhumane side of life under Communism be forgotten". That is a direct rebuke of Milan Kundera's famous (and frivolous) statement that "the condemnation of totalitarianism doesn't deserve a novel". Yes, it does, and in Muller's writing, what being human means in the context of a totalitarian system has a metaphysical lyricism. In his review, the great British writer A. N. Wilson hailed the novel as a "masterpiece of wrenching, Rilkean lyricism", greater than Solzhenitsyn's classic, "One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich". An absolute "must-have" title for Herta Muller collectors. This copy is very prominently and beautifully signed in black ink-pen on the title page by Herta Muller. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. Muller made a rare and historic appearance at the 2012 PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, during which her signature was obtained. This title is a contemporary classic. As far as we know, this is the only such signed copy of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing (American) available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. Please note: Copies available online have serious flaws, are subsequent printings, or are remainder-marked. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A rare signed copy thus. Winner of The Kleist Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes given to writers in German, in 1994. Winner of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1998 for "The Land of Green Plums". Winner of the European Literature Prize in 2006. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009. One of the greatest writers of our time. A fine collectible set. (SEE ALSO OTHER HERTA MULLER TITLES IN OUR CATALOG) ISBN 080509301X. Seller Inventory # 18476

Bibliographic Details

Title: THE HUNGER ANGEL - Rare Fine Copy of The ...

Publisher: New York City, NY: Metropolitan Books, 2012

Publication Date: 2012

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

Signed: Signed by Author

Edition: 1st Edition.

About this title

Synopsis:

A masterful new novel from the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize, hailed for depicting the "landscape of the dispossessed" with "the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose" (Nobel Prize Committee)

It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a 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 calculus of hunger that governed the labor colony: one shovel load of coal is worth one gram of bread.

In her new novel, Nobel laureate Herta Müller calls upon her unique combination of poetic intensity and dispassionate precision to conjure the distorted world of the labor camp in all its physical and moral absurdity. She has given Leo the language to express the inexpressible, as hunger sharpens his senses into an acuity that is both hallucinatory and profound. In scene after disorienting scene, the most ordinary objects accrue tender poignancy as they acquire new purpose—a gramophone box serves as a suitcase, a handkerchief becomes a talisman, an enormous piece of casing pipe functions as a lovers' trysting place. The heart is reduced to a pump, the breath mechanized to the rhythm of a swinging shovel, and coal, sand, and snow have a will of their own. Hunger becomes an insatiable angel who haunts the camp, but also a bare-knuckled sparring partner, delivering blows that keep Leo feeling the rawest connection to life.

Müller has distilled Leo's struggle into words of breathtaking intensity that take us on a journey far beyond the Gulag and into the depths of one man's soul.

About the Author:

Herta Müller is the winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the European Literature Prize. She is the author of, among other books, The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment. Born in Romania in 1953, Müller lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats after refusing to cooperate with Ceausescu's secret police. She succeeded in emigrating in 1987 and now lives in Berlin.