The protagonist of Herta Müller's Traveling on One Leg is Irene, a fragile woman, born to a German family in Romania, who has recently emigrated from Romania to Germany. The novel focuses on Irene's relationship with three men: Franz, whom she met in Romania and who is unwilling to respond to her love for him; Stefan, a friend of Franz's; and Thomas, a bookseller and bisexual in perpetual crisis.
Despite her being born to a German family, Irene's place in Germany is as a recent émigré and an unassimilated Romanian German. She feels neither longing for Romania nor any comfort in her newly adopted Germany. Politically and socially isolated, Irene moves within. the emotional orbit of these three men, while at the same time moving between West Berlin, Marburg, and Frankfurt, taking a dissonant journey within strange yet familiar territory.
Characterized by the same sense of profound isolation found in Müller's The Land of Green Plums, Traveling on One Leg is a poignant exploration of exile, homeland, and identity.
Recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature and of Germany's most prestigious literary award, the Kleist Prize, HERTA MÜLLER was born to a German family in Romania in1953. After refusing to cooperate with Ceasescu's Securitate, she lost her job as a teacher and suffered repeated threats before she was able to emigrate to Germany in 1987. She is the author of several other books, including The Land of Green Plums, also published by Northwestern University Press and winner of the 1998 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the world's richest prize for a single work of fiction.
