Traveling on One Leg

Traveling on One Leg (German: Reisende auf einem Bein) is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Herta Müller, published in German in 1989 by Rotbuch Verlag. An English translation was made available in 1998.

Part of the Berlin Wall, 1988. The protagonist Irene visits an acquaintance from whose flat the wall can be seen.

The protagonist Irene is a German-speaking woman in her mid-thirties who has just emigrated from Romania to West Germany and starts living in Berlin in the second half of the 1980s. Traveling on One Leg explores the themes of exile, homeland, and identity, and the protagonist's unsuccessful acquaintance or relationship with three different men.[1]

Irene seeks to escape her traumatisation by creating a collage from newspaper clippings. By the creative process she experiments on what a fluid subjectivity might feel like. Irene can only live in the here and now by denying that she wishes to understand her life and keep in control. So the collage's dynamics between design and serendipity attract her attention and provide some kind of consolation.[2]

Published after Müller's emigration to Germany, it is cited in 2010's History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe, along with Der Teufel sitzt im Spiegel and The Land of Green Plums, as drawing attention to her work in the West.[3] The novel, one of several for which the author was known when winning the Nobel in 2009,[4] was published in English in 1998 by Hydra Books/Northwestern University Press, translated by Valentina Glajar and André Lefevere.

Translations

Further reading

References

  1. William Ferguson, TRAVELING ON ONE LEG By Herta Müller, in: nytimes.com, 21 February 1999
  2. Brigid Haines: „‹The unforgettable forgotten›. The traces of trauma in Herta Müller’s Reisende auf einem Bein“, in: German life and letters, 55 (2002), 3, pp. 266–281.
  3. Cornis-Pope, Marcel; John Neubauer (29 September 2010). History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Century. IV: Types and Stereotypes. John Benjamins Publishing Company. p. 236. ISBN 978-90-272-3458-2.
  4. "Author of The Passport, The Appointment and Travelling on One Leg, Herta Mueller, wins Nobel Prize for Literature". The Herald Sun. 9 October 2009. Retrieved 21 April 2011. She is known for her books The Passport, The Appointment, and Travelling on One Leg.
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