Riveting stuff, Herta Muller's "The Passport" is a soaring kind of prose. I'm grateful to be reading something this painfully brilliant... Lines like "Windisch feels the obstinate member below his navel. The wind knocks on the wood. It's sewing. The wind is sewing a sack in the earth. Windisch hears his wife's voice. S...he says: "Monster." Every night when Windisch turns his breath towards her in bed, she says:"Monster." For two years she has had no uterus in her stomach. "The doctor told me not to," "I'm not going to let my insides be messed about just to please you..."

So much for PW's contention that a "woman writer" didn't make their list of ten best books of 2009...

http://www.amazon.com/Passport-Masks-Herta-M%C3%BCller/dp/185242139...