In the film, we see a police officer wondering how to dispose of an illicit pig in such a way as to prevent anyone else in his apartment block from finding out here, too, are pigs – or rather their internal organs, earned by one of the narrator's friends, Lola, in return for sexual favours, and stashed away in the furthest corner of the fridge. For the latter, think either of Tibor Fischer's novel Under the Frog, which deals with Hungary between 1944 and the 1956 uprising (and which pulls off the extraordinary feat of being both very funny and very moving), or, more contemporaneously, the film Tales from the Golden Years, which deals with the same subject as The Land of Green Plums: life in Ceausescu's Romania. To deal with the experience of totalitarianism would appear to demand either a talent for such poetic near-evasion or for absurdist, almost surreal comedy. Certainly The Passport, recently republished, is grim almost to the point of self-parody (besides the bleakness of scenery, there is a night-watchman given to gnomic utterances such as 'The frogs are croaking in the mill', and you can imagine that it would be a test of one's endurance to watch a faithful cinematic version of the book).īut this is a perfectly valid way of expressing such life in art. Whether she deserves to be called, in effect, the best writer in the world is something Anglophones don't, perhaps, have enough exposure to her work to comment on. (I am rather ashamed she has been off my radar her Nobel is not as much of a bolt from the blue as JMG le Clézio's was last year.) O nce again, the Nobel committee has nonplussed the Anglophone literary world by awarding its prize for literature to someone most of us have never heard of – although that would not include the people at Serpent's Tail, who published an early work of hers, The Passport, in 1989 – three years after it appeared in German – or Granta, who published this in 1998, five years after its German publication.

The land of green plums