They must still be throwing a party at the offices of Northwestern University Press. Their 10-year-old edition of The Land of Green Plums, one of only four of Herta Müller’s novels ever translated into English, has suddenly become a necessary purchase for every university library and large public outfit in the country. And there will be many buyers, including the Yale Library; its copy is missing, but that fact that may have gone unnoticed for many years had I not wondered last week who this “unknown,” severely-haircutted new Laureate was and requested that the Library place her book on hold for me.

It is an entirely different matter, however, whether Americans will ever actually read Müller’s prose once it takes its featured place in world literature sections across the county. By all accounts, Müller is a name esoteric even within American academic circles, but she is not a literary outsider in the sense that the American public expects. Neither is she an insider. Dictatorship and linguistic hybridization are not topics often found in the traditional European canon even of the twentieth century; indeed, both those themes more commonly appear in the collected outsider literature Müller’s work seems excluded from by virtue of her German citizenship. But her receipt of the Nobel is indeed a more fortuitous event—for both the Prize and literature in general—than it might at first appear, and Müller deserves an honest read in the United States precisely because we have no idea where to put her on the bookshelf.

Our cluelessness goes back as far as Márquez, who was only the seventh non-Euroamerican writer—out of 80 total—to win the Literature Prize when he received it in 1982. But of the 26 laureates between Márquez and Müller, 8 more are non-Europeans—11, if we accept 2008 Laureate Jean-Marie Gustave le Clézio’s self-identification as Mauritian, count V.S. Naipul as a mythmaker of colonial “wogs and darkies” (Edward Said’s words), and consider Gao Xingjian Chinese by virtue of his writing rather then French by virtue of his late-in-life naturalized citizenship. National accounting aside, since Márquez, the rule in Stockholm has been to reward authors from Central Europe and the former colonies in what seems at times a gesture of literary reparation and hegemonic self-effacement. The “good old-fashioned” types no longer win, or do so rarely. Even most of the Europeans who have won the prize in the last three decades tend to be on its margins somehow—Austro-Hungarian (Jelinek), proto-feminist (Lessing), post-Soviet (Szymborska), slave-memorial (Morrison). Even at first glance it seems that William Golding, Claude Simon, Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, Dario Fo, Günter Grass, José Saramago, and Harold Pinter are the only laureates in the last quarter century as concerned with the play of literary form for its own sake as they are with sounding it as a trumpet blast against domineering globalized Westernism. We are comfortable shelving all of them with Gide and Proust, Hesse and Hamsun, Eliot and Pasternak—and Márquez et al. with … well, each other.

Twenty-five years of Nobel have segregated our book collecting, but all is not lost, since Müller’s greatest power may well lie in her ability to reunify our study shelves and literary selves. I cannot presume to talk of style with a degree of sophistication acceptable to professional critics, but a discussion of basic subject matter is all we need.

Müller writes about a surprising kind of oppression—German ethnics in a Romanian dictatorship. Her plots tell of a nationality infamous for its own acts of persecution itself suddenly placed under the foot of another power. Her stories in some ways reflect her life—her father was a member of the SS, her mother a Soviet prisoner in the later 1940s—and while a family history of this sort is not altogether unexpected for an author from India, Trinidad, or South Africa, the notion of an oppressed German is eminently strange. Almost 300 years of history have brought us Westerners to assume too readily that modernity centers itself in England and radiates itself outward in concentric rings, with cultural sophistication and inclusive government decreasing with each level outward.

The Nobel Prize for Literature has, until this point, only enshrined these divisions by awarding itself to three broad literary groups: core Westerners exploring the edges of form and narratology as a near-academic discourse, Central Europeans writing (post-)Soviet literary curios, and frontiersmen inventing a national tradition with the hopes that it will find a spot in college and university curricula. Müller is without a doubt operating on the border of the second and third groups, and since she belongs to the geography of the first, she is familiar to us in spite of all her unpredictability.

To embrace that familiarity is to put Müller exactly where she belongs, namely, on our bookshelf twice—between Márquez and Szymborska, Coetzee and Heaney, an essential link in a chain that connects the West to the rest, equates postcolonialism with the experience of World War II, and suggests the possibility of a fully borderless literary future.