from the winner of the 2009 nobel prize in literaturethe passport has the same clipped prose cadences as nadirs this time applied to evoke the trapped mentality of a man so desperate for freedom that he views everything through a temporal lens like a prisoner staring at a calendar in his cellwall street journala swift stinging narrative fablelike in its stoic concision and painterly detailthe philadelphia inquirerthe passport is a beautiful haunting novel whose subject is a german village in romania caught between the stifling hopelessness of ceausescus dictatorship and the glittering temptations of life in the west stories from the past are woven together with the problems windisch the village miller faces after he applies for permission to migrate to west germany herta mller herta mueller describes with poetic attention the dreams and superstitions conflicts and oppression of a forgotten region the banat in the danube plain in sparse poetic language muller captures the forlorn plight of a trapped people