Elfriede Jelinek

Erika Kohut is a woman in her mid-thirties who teaches piano at the prestigious Vienna Conservatory. She lives with her controlling mother in a very taught and unhealthy relationship. Erika rebels in various including buying clothing she never wears, self-harm, and deliberately injuring strangers. Over the course of the novel she also explores her repressed sexuality by going to pornographic movies, peep shows, and practicing voyeurism.

Walter Klemmer, a student over a decade younger than show more Erika, begins to show her attention. Their desire grows and when they finally acknowledge it, Erika requests a sadomasochistic relationship. Walter, who is an arrogant prick, really justs wants to have sex with an older woman and move on. Things go horribly, horribly wrong.

I saw this book described as "erotic" but there's absolutely nothing sexy about it. In fact, it is quite repulsive. Jelinek seems to revel in using the most unpleasant description possible for the human condition and the human body. It just gets worse and worse and I really struggled to finish this book. I've also seen the book described as "satire," but it reads to me as nothing more than caustic misanthropy. show less

The language, the sense, & the actual are distorted into a surreal, nightmarish landscape. Initial impressions include a sweeping omniscience, cacophony, an onslaught of words, & a descent into madness. The translation by Gitta Honegger must be spectacular to capture the movement & musicality of this horror.

My initial reading gave me ghastly & disturbing dreams. I woke up multiple times because my brain felt like it was roiling &, in reality, I got almost no sleep because I was so, so show more disturbed. It's like it triggered some awful cascade in my mind. I think my disturbance is the point of the book, what Jelinek wants.

However, I'm not sure I can continue with this book. It's like I've taken a personal escalator into a pit of hell. "Breathtaking" is not a word I would use unless it is to describe the sensation of breathing in literal fire as your lungs disintegrate. My senses feel drowned.

I do think it's probably a great work & I do wish I could read it. But I cannot. show less

A darkly comical satire on the sex lives of the Austrian Bourgeoisie. Jelinek wants to make us see how the ideas about sexual relations, consumer products, high culture and winter sport that we get from the dominant ideology are all there to reinforce the abusive power of rich over poor, strong over weak, industry over nature, and men over women that go together - in her view - with modern capitalism. She does this by turning all these propaganda tools around to say the opposite of what show more we're used to hearing. The language of porn is used (quite literally, ad nauseam) to make us see sex as repulsive and abusive; lines from advertisements, political manifestos, poems, and the Bible are wilfully misapplied (a line from a Schubert song suddenly turns out to be talking about a penis instead of a romantic poet...). Very clever, and something only a writer with Jelinek's overpowering anger and magical facility with words could even begin to get away with.

The story follows the lives of a model Austrian family in a small community in the mountains: the Herr Direktor who runs the paperworks that is the only important local employer (and hence has a quasi-feudal power of life or death over everyone in the village); his wife Gerti, and their annoying small son who talks all the time and gets in the way when they want to have sex (evidently a little dig at Hamlet...). Gerti passively acquiesces in her husband's frequent, complex and increasingly obnoxious sexual demands (unfortunately, the HIV panic is at its height, and he's forced to seek all his pleasures at home for the time being), and she accepts the new clothes, hairdressing appointments and consumer durables that she gets in return, but she's also taking to the bottle, and drifts into a brief, unhappy affair with the heartless but angelic skier, Michael. In this world, sex is only marginally about the prospect of brief - and usually illusory - pleasure; what's really going on is men getting a thrill from their dominance and possession, whilst women desperately try to find the validation of having someone out there who needs and appreciates them. Jelinek makes it clear that the Herr Direktor puts Gerti firmly in the same category as his Mercedes, his hi-fi, and the workers' choir he conducts: an expensive bit of precision engineering he can bend to his will by twiddling the appropriate knobs.

I think what Jelinek is doing here is not attempting to persuade us that all marriages are like this, or that Austria is run by robber-barons who haven't changed much since the 14th century, but rather she's using her exaggerated disgust to show us how easily the discourse of sex can be twisted to feed us false ideas. If she can do this to us in 250 pages, how far have our minds been warped by all the stuff we've read about sex and romance, and all the films and washing-powder commercials we've seen...? show less

A uniquely structured but uneven novel that largely deals with control, The Piano Teacher operates through childhood trauma and sexual repression underneath its series of masochistic degradation and violation. In this mother-daughter relationship moulded from unhealthy dependencies, a seemingly omniproof protection asphyxiates the prey: the middle-aged daughter Erika Kohut who does not have a life of her own outside her piano lessons. What seems to be a maternal preservation of innocence show more becomes a descent to self-destruction; and what seems to be the appealing notion of parental trust becomes a game of manipulation. Whilst this habitual power trip also tips the already off-balanced relationship it further plunges down with the arrival of a student who becomes infatuated with Erika. A cat-and-mouse chase ensues until it reveals itself to be another, but much perverse, game of manipulation. "Love" has a deformed face. Who shall be in control this time?

Behind the voyeuristic nature of the narrative which at times is horrific, even revolting, a gamut of loneliness runs its course amidst Erika’s filthy actions. There is a painful attempt at trying to take back any kind of control for one’s own sanity, however drastic, in any way possible. And it may be that even sanity loses itself in the process. The result is a dismal self-infliction. Adulthood is only a childhood warped in its worsened state with a worse outcome ("I have no feelings. Get that into your head. If I ever do, they won't defeat my intelligence"). It suggests a cycle without an end so long as loneliness is (un)successfully alleviated by dangerously pleasure-seeking comforts and consumingly fatal / foetal type of reliance. The possession of self-identity is lost or rather nonexistent in the first place. Art becomes a malady instead of a therapy; classical music will definitely never be the same.

(This is certainly one of the few instances where I prefer the film from the book. The outstanding Isabelle Huppert under Michael‌ Haneke’s direction has made an easily detestable character into a much conflicted and complex woman.) show less