Critics have recognized Müller's writing as political, "as a form of manifest resistance against totalitarian claims to power," and have studied her "complex and ambiguous imagery."[13] According to Larry Wolff, reviewing the book for The New York Times, the poetic quality of the language is essentially connected to its author's objective: "the author seeks to create a sort of poetry out of the spiritual and material ugliness of life in Communist Romania."[12] Critics have generally shown appreciation for the novel's language, as did Nicholas Lezard, writing in The Guardian:
The prose, while simple at the level of the sentence (and we can safely assume that Hofmann's translation is very faithful to the original), is shifty, blurred, to the point where at times we are left unsure as to what exactly is going on – a deliberate flight from causation, quite understandable in a country where everyone (even, we learn, the horses) has been driven mad by fear.[14]
Though the novel's language, and Müller's language in general, is praised for its precision--Peter Englund, secretary of the Swedish Academy, noted her "extreme precision with words"[1]—many things are left unsaid. As a reviewer for The Australian noted, the narrator is never named, the words "totalitarian" and "liberty" never appear in the book, and even Ceausescu, usually referred to as the "dictator," is named only twice, first when one of the characters (a Jewish WWII survivor) notes how the greeting "ciao" is also the first syllable of the dictator's name, and again when a comparison is made between Ceausescu, Hitler, and Stalin.[15]
