The Appointment, by Herta Müller

The Appointment wasn't in the original stack of six books that I pulled out to read during Women in Translation Month, but after getting through the first five, I started the last book I had intended to read and found it just wasn't what I wanted to read in that moment. So I went back to the shelves (conveniently, I had slightly pulled out all the books by women in translation that I had not read) and looked for another option. I'd been meaning to read Herta Müller for a while; she was the writer I'd selected to read for Romania for my world books project.

I found The Appointment slow going at times, but I really liked it. The narrator is a young woman who has been summoned to an appointment for questioning by the secret police. In the present of the book, we don't know how many times the narrator has been summoned before, but we know it has happened several times. The book spans the slow, frequently disrupted tram ride she takes from her apartment to the government building where she will be interrogated. As she rides the tram, her observations of the passengers around her are interspersed with her memories: from childhood, her first marriage, her relationship with her current lover, Paul, her friend Lilli, who was killed trying to flee their home country, and memories of previous interrogations with the secret police – always with the same creepy captain. The story that unfolds is beautiful and grim.