The Appointment

The Tram Ride

The narrator — she is never named — is on a tram in Ceaușescu’s Romania, riding to one of her regular appointments with Major Albu of the Securitate. She has been summoned before, many times. She knows the route. She knows Albu’s face, his small habits, the particular way he uses silence as a tool. She has learned not to arrive too early or too late. She has learned what to wear and how to sit and how to answer questions in ways that are not lies but are also not truths that can be used against her or the people she loves.

The accusation is almost absurdly specific: she has been sewing notes into the lining of men’s suits at the factory where she works, asking the foreign buyers who receive them to marry her and take her out of Romania. Some of this is true. She did sew the notes. She was desperate. She would do it again. The interrogations are not, strictly speaking, about the notes — Major Albu does not care about the notes. They are about something else: about establishing the habit of appearing, the habit of answering, the habit of being watched and knowing you are watched and knowing that the watcher knows you know. This is what the interrogations are actually for.

As the tram moves through the city, the narrator’s mind moves through her life. Her friend Lilli, who was beautiful and who laughed at the regime’s absurdities and who has since disappeared into a labor camp or a worse place — nobody says where exactly. Her friend Paul, who loved Lilli and now lives in a city of careful silences. Her mother, who is very old and very frightened. Her current partner, who is kind in ways she does not quite trust. The tram fills and empties. People get on and off. She watches them with the hypervigilance of someone who has learned that any face could be an informer’s face.

Memory as Survival

Müller’s prose in The Appointment does something formally distinctive: it mimics the cognitive distortions produced by chronic fear. The narrative is not ordered by time or by logic but by association — a detail on the tram triggers a memory of Lilli, which triggers a memory of a particular conversation, which triggers a specific physical sensation, which connects back to the present moment and the approaching stop. The effect is not stream of consciousness in the Woolf sense — it is too precise, too deliberately strange — but a kind of heightened attentiveness in which the mind makes connections that ordinary calm would not permit.

This is what totalitarian surveillance does to consciousness, Müller is arguing: it does not simply make people frightened. It makes them more alert, more associative, more aware of texture and implication and the gap between what is said and what is meant. The narrator notices everything — the color of a man’s shoes, the way another passenger holds a newspaper, the exact temperature of the air as the tram doors open. Under Ceaușescu, noticing was a survival skill. The same heightened attention that makes the narrator a good witness of her own life makes her a potential threat to the regime, which is why she is on the tram at all.

The friends who appear in the narrator’s memory — Lilli especially — are drawn with the particular clarity of people who can no longer defend themselves, who exist now only in the memories of those who loved them and escaped. Müller, who left Romania in 1987 after years of Securitate harassment, writes from inside this experience with a precision that has no sentimentality in it. The grief is real, but it is contained in the prose’s density rather than expressed through it. The formal constraint of the single tram journey is what makes this containment possible.

Müller’s Romanian Trilogy

The Appointment belongs to a loose body of Müller’s work about Ceaușescu’s Romania that also includes The Land of Green Plums (1994) and The Hunger Angel (2009). The three books are not connected by plot or character, but they form a sustained imaginative engagement with the same reality from different angles. The Land of Green Plums is about a group of young friends whose resistance to the regime destroys them. The Hunger Angel moves to a different horror — the deportation of Romania’s German-speaking minority to Soviet labor camps in 1945 — though it continues the investigation of how extreme conditions reshape identity.

Of the three, The Appointment is the most formally concentrated and, arguably, the most formally perfect. It is also the most demanding: the non-linear memory structure and the prose’s deliberate estrangement require an active reader willing to work at the novel’s own pace. Müller’s Nobel Prize in 2009 was awarded with the citation “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed” — a description that The Appointment’s tram journey enacts almost diagram-clearly.

Michael Hofmann’s English translation captures the strangeness of Müller’s German without domesticating it. Müller writes in German — she is an ethnic German from the Banat region of Romania — and her German is itself a form of estrangement: a minority language spoken by a community that was persecuted as German after the war and persecuted as Romanian thereafter. The translation carries that double displacement into English with considerable skill. Readers coming to Müller for the first time should begin with The Land of Green Plums, which is fractionally less demanding, and come to The Appointment second.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — Müller’s most formally brilliant novel: a single tram ride that maps the entire psychological landscape of life under Ceaușescu, in prose as compressed and strange as the system it describes.