This bizarre relationship with her mother dominates her life. She puts Erika against the wall, under interrogation – inquisitor and executioner in one…Įrika is a teacher of piano at the Vienna Conservatory but to say that she leads a double life is an understatement. But her mother looms before her, confronts her. Now she bursts into the apartment like a swarm of autumn leaves, hoping to get to her room without being seen. Eventually Erika learned to move swiftly. Her father promptly left, her father exited.

The baby was born after long and difficult years of marriage. Her mother is old enough to be her grandmother. Mama liked calling Erika her little whirlwind, for the child can be an absolute speed demon.

The piano teacher, Erika Kohut, bursts like a whirlwind into the apartment she shares with her mother. The turbulent piling on of images is like The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead. It reminds me of the frantic prose in Rosa Cappiello’s Oh Lucky Country, and Elias Canetti’s Auto-da-Febecause it depicts extreme behaviour. 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. 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 a bookseller’s blurb as a ‘haunting tale of morbid voyeurism and masochism’, albeit ‘one of the greatest contemporary European novels’.

(Periodically it goes through phases of ‘dumbing down’ so the pressure needs to be sustained). 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. 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). The prize was not without controversy because of her views about feminism and her political opinions, considered extreme. 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’. Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian author who writes in German.

The piano teacher book jelinek