Gay literature’s new wrinkle

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 15:59:00 +0000

This week sees the publication of "The Hunger Angel," by the Romanian-born German author Herta Müller. It’s her first novel to appear in English since she won the Nobel Prize three years ago, and the book, set in a Soviet labor camp in the years after World War II, arrives in America trailing behind it a passel of rave reviews in the European press: a masterpiece, they say, to be put next to Solzhenitsyn or Primo Levi.

But, more quietly, "The Hunger Angel" is something else – a major addition to the tradition of gay literature, and a rare evocation of gay life in the war years and after. Leo, the narrator, is just a teenager when he’s deported from Romania to the Ukraine, but he has already had his first “strange, filthy, shameless and beautiful” assignations in the town park and the local bathhouse. At first he sees his deportation as a welcome escape from his Nazi-supporting father, and a mercy for the mother he truly loves, for in his own eyes he is a double disgrace: not just gay, but an ethnic German who sleeps with Romanians. In the camp, hunger becomes all-consuming, and he longs for home, but he also watches fellow skin-and-bones detainees sneak off to an industrial wreck for sex and knows, “If I’d been caught in the camp I’d be dead.” "The Hunger Angel" lets a gay man embody universal themes of suffering and endurance but also captures the unique contradictions of gay desire – a substantial accomplishment, and one that’s even more impressive because Herta Müller is a straight woman.

“Is Journalism Worth Dying For?”: One woman’s story

Wed, 04 May 2011 01:01:00 +0000

For Anna Politkovskaya, Russia was a grim country -- a "managed democracy" governed by brutal leaders and craven bureaucrats, policed by violent and extortionist security services, and reported on only by "servants of the Presidential Administration." Her crusading, obsessive journalism made her many enemies, not least inside the Kremlin; she endured beatings, poisoning, and a mock execution; but she did not back down. Murdered in 2006, her killers never found, Politkovskaya lives on in "Is Journalism Worth Dying For?," a collection of her "final dispatches."

Salon.com > Jason Farago

Gay literature’s new wrinkle

“Is Journalism Worth Dying For?”: One woman’s story