"The Passport" is a beautiful, haunting novel whose subject is a German village in Romania caught between the stifling hopelessness of Ceaucescu's dictatorship and the glittering temptations of the West. In this novel, 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 Muller 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, Herta Muller captures the forlorn plight of a trapped people.