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Book review | Traveling on One Leg is a search for belonging through fragmented narrative
Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller's tale of Irene, who grapples with alienation as a Romanian émigré in West Berlin, is narrated through fragmented storytelling.
Where does one truly belong — a place, a past, or a sense of self? Some questions resist simple answers, and a perfect example where this stands true is author Herta Müller’s book Traveling on One Leg . Published originally in German, in 1989, its English translation familiarises this reader with the story of Irene, a woman in her mid-thirties in the 1980s, who leaves Romania for West Berlin. As the short novel delves into her unsettling experiences of displacement and alienation, what gets highlighted is her struggle to find a sense of belonging in a new land.
Born into a German family in Romania, Irene’s sense of identity is marked by uncertainty from the very beginning. Her emigration to West Germany only deepens this crisis when she discovers that leaving her homeland does not necessarily mean finding a place where she belongs. Although she escapes Romania’s political conditions, but in her new country she still remains to be an outsider. Capturing this paradox, Müller describes her protagonist as ‘a foreigner in a foreign country’. Her exile, therefore, becomes not simply a geographical separation but a state of permanent in-betweenness. The title, then, perhaps reflects Irene’s constant state of imbalance as she remains divided between where she is and where she has come from. Travelling on ‘one leg’ suggests her inability to be fully present in either body or soul.
Irene’s loneliness can also be witnessed in her attempts to make sense of her new identity, through her relationships with three men: Franz, Stefan, and Thomas. She experiences physical intimacy with each one of them, yet remains emotionally detached and uncertain. She moves through the city observing people and peering into shop windows, yet rarely engages meaningfully with anyone around her, which continues to show how she remains emotionally detached from her surroundings as well. This could be due to the fact that Irene fails to mentally check out of her hometown despite having moved out physically, and continues to lend space to memories dominated by dictatorship, surveillance, repression, and the Wall (referring to the Berlin Wall). Thus, she brings her political past into her present. Though this character's sketch, Müller suggests that home cannot simply be defined by a geographical location, or a legal status, or one’s physical surroundings but is rather an emotional and psychological state that must be found within oneself.
In the process of proving this, however, the storytelling takes a rather non-linear route as Irene’s experience in exile uses her stream of consciousness to present the reader with mostly disjointed thoughts, fragmented images, and fleeting observations. In this sense, the book becomes an extension of its protagonist’s alienation, and her fractured inner world gets reflected in the fragmented narration of her story. This is capable of posing quite a challenge for those readers who aren’t familiar with the style and structure of Müller, who is the recipient of 2009 Nobel Prize in Literature. Yet, none can deny that her writing succeeds at powerfully portraying displacement and its lasting psychological impact on an individual’s sense of identity.
Title: Traveling on One Leg
Author: Herta Müller
Translators: Valentina Glajar and André Lefevere
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Price: ₹599
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