EUROPEAN BOOK CLUB :THE HUNGER ANGEL

By Herta Müller

Saturday, September 16, 2017 – 4:00pm to 6:00pm
Alliance Française de Vancouver
6161 Cambie Street
VANCOUVER, V5Z 3B2
 

Organized by the General Consulate of the Federal Republic of Germany in Canada and EUNIC Canada-Vancouver, the next meeting with the EU Book Club will be with a German novel by Herta Müller.

 

“The Hunger Angel”
(“Autemschaukel”)

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.

The Author

Herta Müller was born in a farming family living in Nitchidorf, outside Timisoara, Romania. Her family belonged to Romania's German-speaking minority, whose vulnerable position during the communist regime came to color her life and literary works. Herta Müller was dismissed from her position as a translator after refusing to cooperate with the Securitate secret police, becoming a teacher and author instead. Her debut work, 'Nadirs', was published in Romania as a censored version in 1982, while uncensored copies were distributed abroad. Herta Müller went into exile in Germany in 1987. She is the recipient of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature.
 

Note: The English translation (by Philip Boehm) of the novel, is available in paperback and e-books formats at Chapters and Amazon and also at the Vancouver Public Library.


Admission is free, but please register by e-mail:  eubookclub@alliancefrancaise.ca