I am a bit embarrassed, along with many other literate Americans this morning, to say that I have never read any fiction by the new Nobel laureate Herta Müller. However, I did read recently an incredible piece of non-fiction by her in Sign and Sight, which I highly recommend, titled Securitate in All But Name. I was drawn to the article after a trip this past summer to Bucharest and Braşov where I saw some remnants of the German-speaking minority in the local food, churches, and language. One does not often, if ever, consider the plight of German-speaking minorities in the world (though I read recently about another such minority in Colombia), but perhaps equally as rare is the consideration of the former security apparatus’s remaining presence in modern Europe. Reminders of the former state were everywhere in Romania, even to my outsider’s eye, and after a long trip through the country Müller’s article helped me to understand what living with those omnipresent terrors might be like. She put a definite scare into me. Anyways, I am now going to fix my ignorance and read an excerpt from her fiction, which can be found here.