The Fox Was Ever The Hunter: A Novel
by Herta Müller
Buy on AmazonFrom the winner of the Nobel Prize hailed as the laureate of life under totalitarianism, a haunting early novel of surveillance and paranoia Romania—the last months of the Ceausescu regime. Adina is a young schoolteacher. Paul is a musician. Clara works in a wire factory. Pavel is Clara’s lover. But one of them works for the secret police and is reporting on the rest of the group. One day Adina returns home to discover that her fox fur rug has had its tail cut off. On another occasion it’s the hindleg. Then a foreleg. The mutilated fur is a sign that she is being tracked by the secret police—the fox was ever the hunter.…
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"An air of Soviet-era menace engulfs The Fox Was Ever the Hunter, the remarkable new novel by Herta Müller, who was described by the Swedish Academy upon her 2009 Nobel Prize win as a writer who “depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” The Fox draws on what Müller suffered while clenched in the jaws of one of history’s most notorious dictatorships, but she infuses characters and events with surreal elements and heightened levels of metaphor. Here, dreams become extensions of life — or life itself is a dream; they are cut from the same fabric, consistently lurid and terrifying."
NPR Books We Love — 2016 · apps.npr.org