The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 14 October 2005
by Elfriede Jelinek
This is an intense book about one thirty-six year-old woman, Erika Kohut, who still lives with her mother, and who has a desperate yearning for human contact outside her constrained life. She was once a budding concert pianist, and it is hard to say if her mother's control or if her own lack of talent stunted her success and sent her into teaching the piano in a Vienna academy. In walks Walter Klemmer, an engineering student smitten by Erika after an evening recital. He is a young man, self-confident and looking to have an affair with his piano teacher. Meanwhile, Erika's mother exerts her form of severe control over who she sees as her possession, her precious child, protected against invasion by any and all men. This is a bleak story, misanthropic in tone, violent and explicit. But it is also unafraid, bold and vivid. Erika lurks in shadowy Viennese peep shows, evesdrops on lovers in park bushes, and harbors fantasies of control. Walter is dumbfounded by Erika, and her ambivalent response to him turns him inside-out, converting this confident lover into a resentful and violent threat. In a 2001 movie based on this novel, Erika's motivations behind her violent fantasies are unclear, and the movie comes off as even darker and emptier of feeling than the book. In the book, Erika harbors a strain of hope for a sincere love. Her constrained life, though, supresses the hope, and all that might remain will be an empty and self-destructive life. Jelinek portrays Erika with intense feeling in dense prose. She has a little less success with Walter, whose motivations appear more superficial. In the end the book itself is troubled, but it has a self-assured and unafraid approach to darkness.
(Jelinek was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize for literature.)