Don’t know how many of you come from ex-communist countries and, even if you do, don’t know if you were not too young to remember how it was.

But, if you’re interested in this subject and in good literature I warmly recommend you a great German author born in Romania (just like me, but a billion times more talented) and awarded with the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature – Herta Müller.

Her books picture the atmosphere of those times, focusing on everyday life. The stories are mostly narrated from the viewpoint of the German minority in Romania. Whether the action happens in a small provincial town (Even back then, the fox was the hunter) or in a concentration camp (Everything I own I carry with me), she presents those everyday little things able to drive you crazy. Because it’s not the shocking events that shock, but the incredible nothingness present everywhere.

The novels have no intense action, but every chapter adds one more piece to the final puzzle of the grey communist feeling. Because, if I would have to give a color to her stories, that would definitely be gray – not the happy bright white, nor the black of terror – just a grey floating heavily in the air. The air that her characters breath until they become grey too.

Indeed, her novels are a bit depressive, but only because, as she said in an interview, she wrote what she saw. And, considering the fact she received death threats for refusing to become an informant for the Securitate (President Nicolae Ceausescu’s department of state security) and her mother was deported to the Soviet Gulag for forced labor, she has good reasons to picture those times in grey.

Don’t know if I made you curious about her novels, but you should try. They are definitely not Sunday books.