Traveling on One Leg

Blurb

Traveling on One Leg is a novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Herta Müller, published in German in 1989 by Rotbuch Verlag. An English translation was made available in 1998.
The protagonist Irene is a German-speaking woman in her mid-thirties who has just emigrated from Romania to West Germany and starts living in Berlin in the second half of the 1980s. Traveling on One Leg explores the themes of exile, homeland, and identity, and the protagonist's unsuccessful acquaintance or relationship with three different men.
Irene seeks to escape her traumatisation by creating a collage from newspaper clippings. By the creative process she experiments on what a fluid subjectivity might feel like. Irene can only live in the here and now by denying that she wishes to understand her life and keep in control. So the collage's dynamics between design and serendipity attract her attention and provide some kind of consolation.
Published after Müller's emigration to Germany, it is cited in 2010's History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe, along with Der Teufel sitzt im Spiegel and The Land of Green Plums, as drawing attention to her work in the West.