Can a person ever truly come home after leaving everything behind?
Home is usually thought of as a place. Herta Müller’s Traveling on One Leg argues otherwise, and it does so through a woman who cannot settle into any country, relationship, or version of herself long enough to call it home.
First published in German in 1989 and now available in English translation, the novel follows Irene, a woman in her mid-thirties who leaves communist Romania for West Berlin in the 1980s. Irene was born into Romania’s German minority, a fact that had already left her identity unsettled before she ever crossed a border. Her move to West Germany, rather than resolving that uncertainty, deepens it. She finds herself belonging fully to neither country, a condition she sums up in a line closely associated with the book: she is “a foreigner in a foreign country.”
The title captures this imbalance precisely. Traveling on One Leg suggests a person who cannot stand fully grounded, either in her body or in her sense of self. Once in West Berlin, Irene tries to construct a new identity through relationships with three men, Franz, Stefan, and Thomas. She becomes physically involved with each of them but remains emotionally distant, unable to let intimacy translate into genuine connection.
At the same time, Irene cannot mentally leave Romania behind. Memories of dictatorship, state surveillance, repression, and the Berlin Wall keep intruding on her present. Her past and present exist side by side, with neither capable of replacing the other.
Through Irene, Müller makes a larger argument. Home is not simply a geographical location or a legal status such as citizenship. It is an emotional and psychological state that has to be found within oneself, and Irene has not found it. Her outward journey from Romania to Germany brings no corresponding inward resolution.
When Exile Becomes a State of Mind
What makes the novel demanding is that Müller does not tell this story through a conventional, linear plot. Instead, she presents it through a stream of consciousness made up of disjointed thoughts, fragmented images, sudden observations, and impressions that appear and disappear without warning.
The structure mirrors Irene’s state of mind. Just as her inner world has been fractured by displacement, the narrative itself is fractured, refusing readers the comfort of a clear, chronological story.
This is both the novel’s greatest strength and its biggest barrier to entry. Readers unfamiliar with Müller’s style may initially find the absence of a conventional narrative arc disorienting. But that difficulty is deliberate.
By making readers work to piece together Irene’s experience, Müller recreates, in miniature, the disorientation that exile can produce in the human mind. The form does not merely describe alienation. It enacts it.
A Novel About the Afterlife of Escape
Müller, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009, is known for this kind of writing across her body of work: dense, unsentimental prose that captures the psychological aftermath of authoritarian rule and the experience of leaving it behind.
Traveling on One Leg is an early and important example of that preoccupation. It is not a book about escape as relief. Instead, it is about escape as the beginning of a different, quieter form of dislocation, one that has less to do with borders and more to do with the self.
For readers interested in literature about migration, exile, displacement, and identity, the novel offers a psychologically layered account that moves beyond familiar narratives of political persecution and resettlement.
It asks a deceptively simple question: What remains of a person once the external markers of home, language, geography, and citizenship, have all changed?
Müller’s answer is neither comforting nor straightforward. Sometimes leaving one place does not mean arriving somewhere else. Sometimes the hardest border to cross is the one that remains inside.
Book Details
Title: Traveling on One Leg
Author: Herta Müller
Translators: Valentina Glajar and André Lefevere
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Price: ₹599
Home is usually thought of as a place. Herta Müller’s Traveling on One Leg argues otherwise, and it does so through a woman who cannot settle into any country, relationship, or version of herself long enough to call it home.
First published in German in 1989 and now available in English translation, the novel follows Irene, a woman in her mid-thirties who leaves communist Romania for West Berlin in the 1980s. Irene was born into Romania’s German minority, a fact that had already left her identity unsettled before she ever crossed a border. Her move to West Germany, rather than resolving that uncertainty, deepens it. She finds herself belonging fully to neither country, a condition she sums up in a line closely associated with the book: she is “a foreigner in a foreign country.”
The title captures this imbalance precisely. Traveling on One Leg suggests a person who cannot stand fully grounded, either in her body or in her sense of self. Once in West Berlin, Irene tries to construct a new identity through relationships with three men, Franz, Stefan, and Thomas. She becomes physically involved with each of them but remains emotionally distant, unable to let intimacy translate into genuine connection.
At the same time, Irene cannot mentally leave Romania behind. Memories of dictatorship, state surveillance, repression, and the Berlin Wall keep intruding on her present. Her past and present exist side by side, with neither capable of replacing the other.
Through Irene, Müller makes a larger argument. Home is not simply a geographical location or a legal status such as citizenship. It is an emotional and psychological state that has to be found within oneself, and Irene has not found it. Her outward journey from Romania to Germany brings no corresponding inward resolution.
When Exile Becomes a State of Mind
What makes the novel demanding is that Müller does not tell this story through a conventional, linear plot. Instead, she presents it through a stream of consciousness made up of disjointed thoughts, fragmented images, sudden observations, and impressions that appear and disappear without warning.
The structure mirrors Irene’s state of mind. Just as her inner world has been fractured by displacement, the narrative itself is fractured, refusing readers the comfort of a clear, chronological story.
This is both the novel’s greatest strength and its biggest barrier to entry. Readers unfamiliar with Müller’s style may initially find the absence of a conventional narrative arc disorienting. But that difficulty is deliberate.
By making readers work to piece together Irene’s experience, Müller recreates, in miniature, the disorientation that exile can produce in the human mind. The form does not merely describe alienation. It enacts it.
A Novel About the Afterlife of Escape
Müller, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009, is known for this kind of writing across her body of work: dense, unsentimental prose that captures the psychological aftermath of authoritarian rule and the experience of leaving it behind.
Traveling on One Leg is an early and important example of that preoccupation. It is not a book about escape as relief. Instead, it is about escape as the beginning of a different, quieter form of dislocation, one that has less to do with borders and more to do with the self.
For readers interested in literature about migration, exile, displacement, and identity, the novel offers a psychologically layered account that moves beyond familiar narratives of political persecution and resettlement.
It asks a deceptively simple question: What remains of a person once the external markers of home, language, geography, and citizenship, have all changed?
Müller’s answer is neither comforting nor straightforward. Sometimes leaving one place does not mean arriving somewhere else. Sometimes the hardest border to cross is the one that remains inside.
Book Details
Title: Traveling on One Leg
Author: Herta Müller
Translators: Valentina Glajar and André Lefevere
Publisher: Aleph Book Company
Price: ₹599
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