LAND OF GREEN PLUMS

Muller takes an unflinching look at the alienation and complexity of a rapidly changing Eastern Europe, focusing on a group of young friends in Ceaucescu's Romania.

The Land of Green Plums is the story of a group of young people in Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania. Having left their impoverished villages for University in search of education and camaraderie, yet largely unprepared for urban life by their provincial childhoods, the youths quickly find their hopes dashed: the city no less than the countryside bears the mark of the dictator's corrosive touch. Soon the focus of political suspicion, the narrator and her friends feel the impact of an oppressive regime: constant surveillance, harassment, humiliating interrogations, police brutality. Eventually, the friends betray each other and themselves: as they do, we see the way the totalitarian state comes to inhabit every human realm and how everyone, even the strongest, must either bend to the oppressors or resist them and thereby perish.