Elfriede Jelinek

[de Renal]

I'm not sure whether anyone has already started the topic related to this excellent female writer (one of my personal favorites), so I wanted to hear your opinion.
Reviews on her writing are divided - some accuse her of pornography, while other praise and reward her for psychollogical autopsy of her characters.
What do you think?

[JBI]

Tried reading one book after she won the nobel, The Piano Teacher I think it was called, was god awful, had to put it down - just so not interesting. I think explicit pornography-challenging fiction in letters seems to have a better market in Austria, and certain European countries than in Canada, where that sort of stuff generally lacks any real hold.

There was an article back a while ago in the Globe And Mail describing actually how a German novel with quirky perversions simply was ignored by Canadians as the "shock" value just didn't sell. I wonder if that could be carried over for this book - in a world where the Internet has porn ads on any and every website, I can't help but feel some weird Sado-Masochistic woman running around Red-Light distrinct Vienna (somewhere where I have coincidentally been, as all the Hostels in Vienna seem to be situated right next door) which in itself isn't a particularly shocking, or exciting place (in truth, I found it kind of dingy - having walked through PatPong in Bangkok, Vienna's "shocks" weren't all that shocking). Though, one must give her credit - for all her anti-Turkish sentiments (it seems only horny Turks go to sex shows, where they line up outside masturbating in advance as to save money) she still won a Nobel.

[de Renal]

But don't you think that prostitution itself is a shocking sociological phenomenon no matter where it is performed?

[Heteronym]

Jelinek's work seems pretty repulsive to me, but perhaps that's because I watched The Piano Teacher and hated it. It may actually be a great novel.

What would you say is her best work, de Renal?

[de Renal]

Actually, the Piano Teacher :D
But I am known as a person who likes the things other people hate :)

What I found shocking while reading this particular novel is the fact how we sometimes percieve the developed countries to be superior, but how their social establishment sucks at the same time. This is what Ms. Jelinek writes about in her books.
Did you ever ask yourself: Where do all the murderers and psychopaths come from? What is their social background?
And it's quite disturbing finding out that they usually live next door.
Other thing which bothers me much is the fact that all these countries have legalized the prostitution. Of course, this is the topic for some other discussion, but as a woman I must say: it's very sad that rich world still have people who need to sell their bodies for money in order to keep their children fed.
On the other hand, it is hard for us "normal" people to understand how it is to live under constat physical abuse (by mother, or father, or husband, or anybody else).
All her novels deal with family relations, social criticism, and emphasise their impact on every one of us.

Please do try to read The Piano Teacher - even though I like all of her novels very much, I find this one best!

[Heteronym]

Well, and what do you have to say about her other novels?

[de Renal]

Other novels too are strong criticism of society; she's writing about the drives in relationships, power and submission, and, most of all, ridicules weakness, superficiality and stupidity.
"Lust" is very good, showing how duplicity, ignorance and selfishness control our lives.
No matter how modern the society we live in is, the taboos are very much present, and I appreciate her writing about them. People should from time to time hear (read) about things they usually dislike; maybe the awareness of existing problems which are not discussed in everyday life, but are usually swept under the carpet, will make them think how we all can change for the better.

[Heteronym]

The synopsis of Wonderful Wonderful Times seems interesting. Have you read it?

[de Renal]

No, that one I didn't, but it's on my holiday reading list.
Why don't you try reading a novel, instead of synopsis, and tell me what you think?

[julio_2731]

I come from the German speaking world and Jelinek is definitely the most difficult German language writer alive today. I do not understand why people would question a Nobel Prize just because they have read the Piano Teacher and they did not like it. Did you know that before Jelinek won the Nobel Prize she won virtually ALL the major German literary prizes known. 23 of them that when she was finally crowned in October 2004 with the nobel laurels the reaction in the German speaking world was "SCHON WIEDER?" meaning NOT AGAIN?!. The Piano Teacher is not her best work. In fact this book was Jelinek's attempt to reach out to her reader by taking up a more realistic voice where she reduced the linguistic acrobatics and silenced the seemingly endless shifiting of points of view which is very typical of her in other works. There are only five books as far as I know (I might be wrong) that got translated to English namely: Piano Teacher, Lust, Greed and Wonderful, Wonderful Times and Women as Lovers. From these five I could say LUST would be the nearest that one could get to taste her literary prowess if one is lucky that the English translation was an excellent one.

The nobel academy did not award her the highest literary prize because of her shock value as you might call it but due to her immense contribution to the German language and the study of language and its use as a whole. Her political opinions may not be really what the readers will like but her linguistic genius especially if one reads her in GERMAN is undeniable. Her command of this language is second to none today.

Another point is that, novels account only HALF of her artistic production. The other half is her revolutionary theatrical plays. Her plays dominate the European theaters like nobody else that even before a release of a new play, theater producers would argue whîch one will be allowed to premiere. She delivered to the hands of theatrical directors a path of revolution in the European theater. With Jelinek's immense talent for linguistic drama the European stage has never been the same. Her plays rejects the traditional voyeristic character of the stage where the audience sit back,relax and watch the characters on stage without having to be involved. She has torn down this demarcation line in which in her theatrical productions the audience's integrity is continually questioned, the viewers complicity is systemically brought to light and challenges them to turn away and exit the theater if they could not bear it anymore. In her plays above all the characters are reduced to voices which become mouthpieces of different layers of language which contradict and complement with each other to unearth a hidden meaning and debunk modern myths and media hysteria. In other words the plot becomes secondary as language as the main player becomes the focus of her post modern theater.

In Horace Engdahl's speech Elfriede Jelinek is a writer who will not bend and will not succumb as time passes by. While her other contemporaries have come from criticising the insitutions to representing them over time, Jelinek is the eptiome of an "OUTSIDER". She resists all attempts to assimilate her voice into the "mainstream" and thus normalize her language and with this reduce the power of her critic of the throw away consumer society. She continually sharpens her pen and stepped further and further away from the public eye as a persona and let her works speak instead with increasing sharpness. Her later works have become so difficult that it is almost impossible to consume them, the more to translate them. She remains staunch to her convictions and that is definitely evident in her latest play FaustIn and Out which descends to the cellars of language and unearths there the beginnings of the so called "cellar of the mind where performances without restrictions can be performed". The play obviously discusses in all disgusting details the monstrosity of the crime commited by Joseph Frtizl who imprisoned his own daughter in a cellar for 24 years, repeatedly raped her and bore many children through incest abuse. The play is an exploration of the imprisonment of thoughts in the limitation of language and how the mind tries to redress these suppressed desires to express into an eventual unimaginable violence. The play in a short synopsis is "the rape of the german language in the hands of the most cruel and most adept theatrical linguist of our time".

If you are really interested in this writer I am am afraid that you will have to try to learn the language German and attempt reading "Kinder der Toten" (Children of the Dead), her acclaimed obra maestra. This is her grandest textual composition which explores the polyphony of language and how language becomes a vehicle for oppression, what kind of language is present in silence and when silence what language will save the memories of those who died in oppression and how language will create that "memory space" which were denied of them.

I heard that since 1996 a group of Jelinek scholars have been working on translating the Kinder der Toten and 16 years from now they are still not done. So I hope one day they will finally breakthrough and give this genius from Austria some justice to the non-german speaking audience.