Jelinek, Elfriede "The Piano Teacher"

(German title: Die Klavierspielerin) - 1988

Reviewed by Marianne
from Let's Read


Elfriede Jelinek received the Nobel Prize for her "musical flow of voices .... "Granted, her language is extraordinary, I loved the way she describes thoughts, actions, objects.

This is a novel about a musician, her mother, her love life. The main subject of the novel is definitely the mother-daughter relationship. I only read afterwards that the novel has a very autobiographic background. I try to read as little about the background of a piece as possible, as often they give away the end and the whole joy of reading the book personally. I think this was good in this case.

I could have strangled the mother, for example, how you can imprison a child in your life, unbelievable. I didn't care much for the sexual desires of the piano player, her voyeuristic and masochistic escapades which turned the book into a bad pornographic piece, at least that's what I imagine bad pornographic pieces to be like, don't have a lot of experience with that kind of literature.

I love reading Nobel prize winners' novels, they usually are chosen for a good reason. Most of them, I couldn't wait to read the next piece. Will I want to read another book by Elfriede Jelinek? Probably not.

And don't forget, I read the original, no translator messed up my perception.

From the back cover:

"Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory by day. But by night she trawls the porn shows of Vienna while her mother, whom she loves and hates in equal measure, waits up for her.

Into this emotional pressure-cooker bounds music student and ladies' man, Walter Klemmer. With Walter as her student, Erika spirals out of control, consumed by the ecstasy of self-destruction.

First published in 1983, The Piano Teacher is the masterpiece of Elfriede Jelinek, Austria's most famous writer. Now a feature film directed by Michael Haneke, The Piano Teacher won three major prizes at the Cannes 2001 Festival including best actor for Benoit Magimel and best actress for Isabelle Huppert."


Elfriede Jelinek received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004 "for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power".

I contribute to this page: Read the Nobels and you can find all my blogs about Nobel Prize winning authors and their books here.

Original Post on "Let's Read". 

Women as Lovers by Elfriede Jelinek

Reviewed by Edith LaGraziana

Fate would have it that during the past weeks unusually many books of recipients and nominees of the Nobel Prize in Literature have come into my hands and I already presented some of them on this blog. I decided that today it’s time at last to also review a book written by the only Austrian Nobel laureate in literature so far although I must admit that I’m no particular fan of my compatriot’s work because the little that I heard or read about it made me avoid the author rather than give her a chance. In the end, I picked Women as Lovers by Elfriede Jelinek which is an early novel of this highly controversial poet, novelist and above all playwright. 

Elfriede Jelinek was born in Mürzzuschlag, Austria, in October 1946. She grew up in Vienna where she studied several musical instruments from an early age on (pushed by her ambitious mother) and later art history and dramatics at university. Anxiety disorder prevented her from earning a degree in the latter studies, but as a therapy Elfriede Jelinek turned to writing. Her first published book was a volume of poetry titled Lisas Schatten (Lisa's Shadow) that came out in 1967. Several novels, some translations and many often highly successful plays followed, and yet only few of her works have been translated into English like the novels Women as Lovers (Die Liebhaberinnen: 1975), Wonderful, Wonderful Times (Die Ausgesperrten: 1980), The Piano Teacher (Die Klavierspielerin: 1983), Lust (1989), and Greed (2000). In 2004 the writer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her latest works are the stage essay rein GOLD and the drama Aber sicher! dating from 2013. Elfriede Jelinek lives in Vienna with her husband. 

The short novel Women as Lovers combines two parallel plot lines set in Austria during the early 1970s. On the one hand, there is the city-bred Brigitte, a young woman working as an unskilled seamstress in a brassiere factory in Vienna to make her living. On the other hand, there is Paula, a fifteen-year-old girl from a village who persuades her parents to allow her, against the local custom, to be apprenticed to dressmaking in the neighbouring small town. Coming from different lower-class backgrounds, both share a dream, the same that already their mothers and grandmothers had: social and economic upgrading through marriage. They want to exchange their unloved and unprestigious jobs as soon as possible for the kind of married life that cinema and magazines make desirable in the most beautiful colours. They dream of eternal love, nice children and a prosperous life including hard work for the family (instead of for strangers) and a comfortable house with an idyllic garden. The strategies of the girls to achieve their goal differ, though. Brigitte takes it into her head to conquer Heinz, an apprentice electrician with a promising future since he is destined to take over his master’s workshop as well as electronic supply shop. Heinz isn’t particularly handsome, nor very sympathetic, but he is Brigitte’s ticket into a better life and she employs all female art of seduction, including sex and getting pregnant, to bind him to her. Paula’s choice is based on attraction rather than reason. She falls up to the eyes in love with the ordinary wood worker Erich from the village. He isn’t bright, but a good-looking young fellow with Italian features and Paula is convinced that she can see to it that he makes her dreams come true. She, too, seduces him with all artifice in her power including sex and pregnancy. Brigitte’s schemes work out as planned and Paula’s don’t, but in the end neither of them is really happy. Their dreams couldn’t stand the test of reality. 

In her third-person narrative Women as Lovers (like in her other works) Elfriede Jelinek plays with clichés, in this case lower-class girls just out of school who are prepared to do almost anything to catch a husband and achieve through them the socioeconomic status that they feel out of their own reach. In the 1970s this may still have been a rather common practice (and it hasn’t been completely abandoned since) because self-confident and self-determined female role models only began to appear at the time. The author depicts Brigitte and Paula as calculating young women who see men mainly as commodities, as futures in which they invest their bodies hoping for good returns. They believe that getting the man will make them happy, but they are mistaken because they disregard the importance of self-respect and independence. The concise narration of the plot and the short sentences make the novel simple in style and sterile with the exception of occasional poetic side steps. The English translator may have had some trouble reproducing certain stylistic peculiarities of the German text. In fact, Elfriede Jelinek broke with the rules of German orthography about the use of capital initial letters writing the entire text in small letters (which seems to have been a bit of a rebellious fashion among writers) and she uses some abbreviations which generally is a taboo in literary writing. 

All those things considered, Women as Lovers by Elfriede Jelinek has been an interesting read which I even enjoyed in a way although it paints a rather too negative and one-sided picture of women. Probably, it was meant to provoke, but it just makes me sad because I know how much truth is in stories of Brigitte and Paula. This one may not have been the best novel that I ever read and it definitely hasn’t made me a fan of the writer, and yet it was at least worth the experience and the time to write its review.

Original post on Edith's Miscellany:
http://edith-lagraziana.blogspot.com/2014/03/women-as-lovers-by-elfriede-jelinek.html

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek (Lisa HIll, ANZ LitLovers)

Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian author who writes in German. According to Wikipedia, she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004 for ‘for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power’.  The prize was not without controversy because of  her views about feminism and her political opinions, considered extreme.  She also offended the Academy for refusing to attend in person to collect the prize, but Wikipedia says this is because she suffers from anxiety disorders (which are none-too-subtly attributed to her mother and to her Catholic education).

I didn’t know any of this when I picked it up at the library; I borrow books like this when I see them to encourage my library to buy serious literature.  (Periodically it goes through phases of ‘dumbing down’ so the pressure needs to be sustained). So you can imagine my dismay when I looked her up online and found her work described as ‘whining, unenjoyable public pornography’   (Knut Ahnlund who in 2005 resigned from the Swedish Academy in protest) and on the Book Depository blurb as a ‘haunting tale of morbid voyeurism and masochism’, albeit ‘one of the greatest contemporary European novels’.   Intrigued, I then checked it out on GoodReads where most reviewers rated it highly…and then stopped messing about and started reading it to find out for myself.

It’s a wild ride.  It reminds me of the frantic prose in Rosa Cappiello’s Oh Lucky Country, and Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Fe because it depicts extreme behaviour.  The turbulent piling on of images is like The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead.  

I read and blogged this book on December 5th, 2010.  To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.wordpress.com/2010/12/05/the-piano-teacher-by-elfriede-jelinek/

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek (Laura's Review)

The Piano Teacher
Elfriede Jelinek
280 pages

This review will be very, very short, because I really disliked this book and was unable to finish it. Erika Korhut is a young woman who, having failed in pursuit of a career as a concert pianist, now teaches piano in Vienna. She lives with her domineering mother who controls every aspect of Erika's life. Erika has no friends, and no romantic relationships, and her mother ensures it stays that way. At the time I abandoned this book, Erika was already engaged in self-destructive behavior, which was about to continue through a relationship with one of her students. But I found the characters lacked depth and were completely dispicable. I didn't care what happened to Erika and was really disappointed by this work from a Nobel prize-winning author.

My original review can be found here.