[Raducaneni, Romania; November 12. Image via Getty]

Roma children play in the village of Raducaneni, 300 km northeast of Bucharest on November 12, 2009. The number of Romanians at risk of falling into poverty will increase by 1.7 percent from 2008, up to 7.4%, with the children facing higher risks according to the World Bank�s Country Partnership Strategy with Romania. AFP PHOTO/DANIEL MIHAILESCU (Photo credit should read DANIEL MIHAILESCU/AFP/Getty Images)

[Bucharest, November 10. Image via Getty]

An elderly Romanian woman sells flowers in front of a shop window advertising hair care products in Bucharest on November 10, 2009. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union last week announced they would delay the next installments of their loan to Romania until a new government was formed. AFP PHOTO DANIEL MIHAILESCU (Photo credit should read DANIEL MIHAILESCU/AFP/Getty Images)

Mueller's first book, a short story collection called Niederungen (Nadirs), was published in Romania in 1982. It depicted the difficulties of life in an ethnically German Romanian village, and was quickly censored by the Communist government of Nicolae Ceausescu. The government eventually barred her from publishing in Romania at all, and Mueller left for Germany in 1987 with her husband (coincidentally named Richard Wagner). Since then she has written a number of essays, short stories, novels, including The Land of Green Plums and The Appointment.

Much of Mueller's work deals with the difficulties inherent in her German-Romanian heritage. According to Larry Wolff, who reviewed The Land of Green Plums in 1996, most of Romania's ethnic Germans returned to Germany either during or after the rule of Ceausescu. Wolff writes that "this marks the end of many communities that had survived from the 18th-century reign of the Empress Maria Theresa," and that Mueller "conveys a certain sadness over the historical implications of emigration, the impending doom of her own native culture and society" (he also notes that Mueller is one of the few female authors to write about life in Communist Eastern Europe). Yet Mueller, whose father was a member of the Waffen SS (like, interestingly, former Nobel winner Gunter Grass), also betrays in her writing a certain ambivalence about her Germanness. The narrator of The Land of Green Plums mentions how embarrassed she feels in the presence of Romanian-Jewish Holocaust survivors:

It was Herr Feyerabend. He was shuffling his feet and pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket. I withdrew my head, as if the white handkerchief could feel that someone like myself was staring at a Jew.

But any shame Mueller felt at Germany's fascist past did not prevent her from criticizing Romania's Communist regime — or the vestiges of this regime that outlasted the fall of Ceausescu. In a 2007 essay on Romania's entry into the EU, Mueller accused the country of "collective amnesia" and of ignoring the continued influence of the officially disbanded Securitate, Ceausescu's secret service. She wrote,

A former dissident gets a job in the public service and is summoned for a swearing in. And when he opens the door, his former Securitate interrogator is standing there to receive his oath on the democratic constitution. Or a former political prisoner applies for a loan at the savings bank in a town. The bank director who tells him that the loan has not been granted was once his prison director.

In Brussels, they'll say the former prisoner should go to another bank. If there's a bank in the town, the EU criteria are fulfilled. The question is: who's the director?

Mueller's criticism of Ceausescu and his supporters notwithstanding, Pete Ayrton, one of her publishers, says, "she writes extraordinary accounts of being an ethnic minority in a totalitarian regime. But this is not overtly political writing; it's very poetic and elliptical. She's an extraordinary writer." A passage from The Land of Green Plums reveals this poetic quality:

Under the pillows in the beds were six pots of mascara. Six girls spat into the pots and stirred the soot with toothpicks until the black paste grew sticky. Then they opened their eyes wide. The toothpicks scraped against their eyelids, their lashes grew black and thick. But an hour later gray gaps began to crack open in the eyelashes. The saliva dried up and the soot crumbled onto their cheeks.

Wolff points out that "since an important purpose of the novel is to represent cultural survival through the German language, any translation necessarily obscures some of the work's significance." At the same time, Mueller's words, even in English, bear out the Swedish Academy's claim that her work, "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed." Perhaps now this "wonderful, neglected writer," as Ayrton calls her, will receive more international attention.

Herta Mueller Wins Nobel Prize In Literature [AP, via NYT]
Herta Müller Takes Nobel Prize For Literature [Guardian]
Strangers In A Strange Land [NYT]
Romania's Collective Amnesia [Sightandsign.com]
Novelist Herta Müller Wins Nobel Prize In Literature [Mediabistro]

[Targoviste, Romania; June 4. Image via Getty]

EU candidate Elena Basescu (L), the daughter of Romanian President Traian Basescu, puts a flower in her hair as she meets Roma people from the outskirts of Targoviste city, some 80 km northwest of Bucharest, during an electoral meeting on June 4, 2009. Romanians are called to vote their representatives to EU Parliament on June 7. AFP PHOTO/DANIEL MIHAILESCU (Photo credit should read DANIEL MIHAILESCU/AFP/Getty Images)

[Bucharest, May 28. Image via Getty]

A member of Belgian street theatre company 'Compagnie du Funambule' performs in front of the Romanian National Theatre as gipsies working as windshields washers take part in the show in Bucharest, on May 28, 2009. Several European street theatre companies will perform on the streets of Bucharest on May 28-31 during the International Street Theatre Festival 'B.Fit in The Street' organized by local authorities. AFP PHOTO DANIEL MIHAILESCU (Photo credit should read DANIEL MIHAILESCU/AFP/Getty Images)

[Bucharest, May 17. Image via Getty]

Romanian women wearing bridal dresses pose in front of the parliament in the center of Bucharest during the Bride Parade on May 17, 2009. Around 100 brides took part in the event organized by a wedding photographer and a bridal wear fashion designer to promote marriage as one of the most glamorous events of a lifetime. AFP PHOTO / DANIEL MIHAILESCU (Photo credit should read DANIEL MIHAILESCU/AFP/Getty Images)

• A journal for plastic surgery says that 98% of women who have breast reconstruction after an elective mastectomy are satisfied with their surgery. • Children conceived with a sperm donor should be told at age four about their origins to lighten anger and shock at their parents. • A Romanian court ordered that a surgeon pay a 33-year-old patient whose penis he had accidently severed during an operation $795,000. Yeah, that is a big "uh oh." • More Penii!: A Portuguese couple continue a tradition of manufacturing 2-foot penis-shaped ceramic bottles that is said to have dated back to the 19th century. • A baby's smile can create a "natural high" in the brains of mommies. • A South African woman with a "soft heart for animals and a tart tongue for most everyone else" runs an animal shelter in Abu Dhabi. • The General Synod, the governing body of the Church of England, is set to debate over the issue of appointing female bishops, sparking a debate between traditionalists and progressive members of the Church. • Swiss researchers suggest that same-sex transplants should be performed after they found an 8% chance of rejection when a male kidney was given to a woman. • The Monday after a three-day weekend always sucks, so here is a cute video of a bunny opening up an envelope with his own paper-nomming!

According to the Guardian, even the Orthodox church, to which the majority of Romanians belong, thinks the girl should be permitted to get the abortion. Constantin Stoica, a church spokesman, said that her case is "an exceptional situation which must be treated in an exceptional manner and the family is the only one to take this decision." The Britain abortion plan's opponents, including the National Doctors Council, say that the "the rights of the fetus should be considered and the pregnancy should go ahead." A government committee decides this girl's fate today. Fingers crossed that she's allowed safe passage across the English Channel.

UPDATE: The girl will have her UK abortion! The Telegraph also has some heartbreaking quotes from the child's parents about the situation. But thank goodness for reasonable heads prevailing.

Romania To Rule On Abortion In UK For Girl, 11 [Guardian]
Pregnant 11-Year-Old Romanian Rape Victim May Travel To UK For Abortion Because Of Our Longer Legal Limit [Daily Mail]

Earlier: 14-Year-Old Polish Rape Victim Now Caught In Abortion Rights Battle
Romanian Abortion Drama 4 Months Opens To Rave Reviews
I Watched That Romanian Abortion Movie So You Don't Have To

New York Times

4 Months deserves to be seen by the largest audience possible, partly because it offers a welcome alternative to the coy, trivializing attitude toward abortion now in vogue in American fiction film...Mr. Mungiu never forgets the palpably real women at the center of his film, and one of its great virtues is that neither do you.

The action takes place over the longest 24 hours in the lives of fellow college students Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) and her roommate, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca, who'd win an Oscar in my ideal universe). Gabita is the pregnant one; she's also the more childlike one, nearly paralyzed with fear. So it falls to Otilia, the more resourceful one, to arrange for a termination — raising the cash, procuring the abortionist, and booking the hotel in which the terrible business can be done...Misery is everywhere in this spare masterpiece, but so is artistic triumph.

Otilia's powerlessness is more and more palpable, and as she struggles to keep her focus, the camera remains transfixed. So do we. It's 1987, two years before the overthrow of the Stalinist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, a time of shortages and cynicism, and Otilia's dogged composure becomes increasingly heroic. We want her not just to survive, but to survive with her humanity intact.

The abortion is the ultimate violation of Gabita's body—and not just hers. The procedure is shown in an unflinching single take. How do these Romanian actors train? As in Lazarescu, the ensemble scenes are mind-boggling, and the principle performances get at an authenticity beyond naturalism.

For all the lack of overt political suppression in the film, something about the dulling of basic courtesies tells us everything about life under the totalitarian grind. Otilia, standing at the check-in desk, might be a lover, wearily seeking refuge for a tryst. In fact, she is dealing not with love but its consequences. And the love isn't even hers.

In a coda, set in the hotel restaurant, Mungiu gives us a moment to let the themes of the film resonate. He knows that in Romania today abortion is a common form of contraception and that being pro-choice doesn't make him an advocate of the easy fix. It's the tension between those two poles, movingly readable on Marinca's face, that deepens the film's meaning and raises it very close to the level of art.

The reason "4 Months" has such resonance is because it believes with fearless audacity in the power and possibility of the medium. Writer-director Mungiu has an almost old-fashioned faith that film can explore the most painful subjects, ask the deepest questions, deliver the most important meanings.

Foremost among the many revelations is Marinca's stellar turn as Otilia. It's not just the way she transforms scripted dialogue into real-speak (a quality shared by the rest of the stellar cast), but her ability to convey all her inner struggles in silence. Vasiliu is equally fine, a frightened young woman desperate to end her ordeal.

4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days (2007) [New York Times]
4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days [Entertainment Weekly]
Thawed Rage [New York Magazine]
Gone Baby Gone [Village Voice]
Monstrous Times [New Yorker]
4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days [Rolling Stone]
'4 Months' [Los Angeles Times]
4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days [Variety]