In her acceptance speech for the 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature, Herta Müller said of her life: ‘The arc that stretches from a child herding cows in the valley to the Stockholm City Hall is a strange one.’ The autobiographical work The Village on the Edge of the World traces this arc from Müller’s childhood in a German-speaking village in Romania, through her persecution as a young writer under the Ceauşescu regime, to her ultimate emigration to Germany. The book, first published in German in 2014 as Mein Vaterland war ein Apfelkern and now appearing in Kate McNaughton’s English translation, is based on a series of interviews between Müller and her editor, Angelika Klammer. The interviewer has a light hand, steering Müller towards topics but letting her digress. The book feels nothing like an interview transcript; rather, it is more like an episodic yet full-bodied memoir, rich in resonances and recurrent motifs.

Early in the book, Müller remarks: ‘The political has all sorts of psychological effects; it plays a fatal part in everything and everyone. Every family history is also the private imprint of contemporary history.’ Her own family illustrates this point keenly: while her father served in Hitler’s SS, it was her mother – in what Müller describes as an unjust distribution of guilt and punishment between the two – who spent five years in a Soviet labour camp after the war as part of a policy of punishing Romania’s German minority for their collaboration with the Nazis. The starvation her mother endured in the camp haunted Müller’s childhood. Hunger and strange ways of eating emerge as an obsessive theme in The Village on the Edge of the World: as a child, Müller furtively tastes inedible plants (‘Clearly, I never happened on anything poisonous’) and devours other taboo items – bitter green apricots, berries from a graveyard, bits of paper. When she begins writing as an adult, the experience induces ‘a kind of word hunger’. Later, Müller incorporates into her creative process a habit of slicing words out from newspapers and cutting them apart to create new words. This tactile practice, she says, is a way of sating her hunger.

Müller has a penchant for coining new terms, from Atemschaukel (breath-swing), the original title of The Hunger Angel (2009), her acclaimed novel set in a Soviet forced labour camp, to Herztier (heart-beast), which she mentions repeatedly in The Village on the Edge of the World. Her experiments with language demand