The Fox Was Ever the Hunter

Extraordinary... Muller lays bare the totalitarian attack on the individual and the everyday horror of life under a repressive regime. There is a cinematic intensity to the narrative... This ethereal, other-worldly atmosphere gradually gives way to the horrors of a more defined reality... The mounting tension made tangible by such scenes is felt most intensely in Muller's language. Short, clipped sentences accumulate, overlapping and building into a noisy, symphonic whole... A profoundly unsettling novel, which renders palpable the cruelty of life under the regime, as well as the brittle exhilarations of its overthrow -- Charlotte Ryland * TLS *
Her prose - as poetic as it is blunt -works like a prism, shattering and illuminating a world that is always watching, waiting. [A] dark collage, which glints with fear - and with beauty * The Atlantic *
Poetic [and] haunting... deftly rendered by Philip Boehm... In her writing, Müller inches closer to narrowing the gap between people and things, between life and language * Washington Post *
When the collage is completed, the reader understands that each and every one of Müller's stories, every flight of luscious language and every brutal fact, has been necessary in depicting a society torn to pieces and tasked, with the curtains finally open and the light streaming in, with putting those pieces back together to make sense of it all * New York Times *
Herta Muller fled Romania for Germany, and the lingering memories of her ex-state's oppressiveness saturate this novel. Set in the final months of Ceausescu's rule... [It's] effective at evoking a monotonous, joyless existence defined by hunters preying on hunted -- Lesley McDonald * Sunday Herald *