New York Times publica un amplu portret al Hertei Muller ; inca una dintre ocaziile acelea rare in care tinem o pagina intreaga din ziar cu un articol in care se vorbeste despre Romania, fara cersetori . il puteti citi integral aici
“I never wanted to be a writer,” Ms. Müller said in an interview while in New York this month for the PEN World Voices literary festival. “There were no books at home.”
But when, as a teenager, she was sent off to high school in Timisoara, the closest city, she said: “Whatever I read went under my skin, I almost devoured the literature, which became like a road to discovery. And this is how it stayed. I always wanted to know, how should one live? I write in order to bear witness to life.”
Exposure to those new ideas made her a nonconformist and ultimately a dissident, fired from her job for refusing to cooperate with state security. Her first efforts as a writer were when she was a university student, and she and a group of friends published unauthorized literary work and statements in favor of freedom of expression.
Valentina Glajar, a Romanian-born scholar who teaches at Texas State University, was a translator of “Traveling on One Leg,” an early Müller book. She has also examined some of the secret police dossiers on Ms. Müller that were declassified after the collapse of Communism in 1989, two years after Ms. Müller had immigrated to West Germany and began the uneasy process of trying to define her place in that new setting. Ms. Glajar was startled by what she found.
“What most impressed me was how many of the facts in her file she then expressed artistically in her writing,” Ms. Glajar said. “So much of it is true. And like everyone else, I was surprised by how many sources in her wider entourage had to inform on her: her neighbors, the director of a theater in Timisoara, a teacher at one of the schools where she taught kindergarten who was someone she considered a friend.”
