2015: The Year of Reading Women discussion

Who needs Stephen King when you have Nobel Prize for Lit-winning Austrians splaying out your sociocultural oppression and leaving it out to dry.

Heh, this should be interesting...

*Bookmarks*

Well, I've never heard of Jelinek before, but how can you go past that intro! Count me in if this gets going.

You have to be brave, Russel. ;) A few of us read her The Piano Teacher a while ago, and it was quite an experience!

I think there was some controversy over her being awarded the Nobel Prize but I think she is a superb writer and it was well deserved. She is excoriating in her no holds barred exploration of cultural norms of society. This of course does not make for easy reading either literally or figuratively but whew is she thought-provoking in her fictional analysis of the ills that surround us.

You're right on the money there, Nicholas.

I heard about the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek when she won Nobel Prize in 2004. However, I took too seriously the ridiculing comment made at that time by Knut Ahnlund , the respected Swedish Academy member and the man who was responsible for giving Nobel Prize to Gabriel Marquez . He left the Swedish Academy in protest, describing Jelinek's work as "whining, unenjoyable public pornography", as well as "a mass of text shovelled together without artistic structure". I therefore didn’t pay any attention to her till last year when I read a passage from “The Piano Teacher” while browsing the book and instantly decided to buy it. Believe me, I read the whole book in a week and came to the realization that Knut Ahnlund was terribly wrong in his judgement. This book is a dark beauty. A very different style of writing which is intensely poetic and laced with original humour. It has also many meditative passages on art. The novel starts with the strange but inextricable relationship between Erika , a clumsy Piano teacher and compulsive voyeur (a kind of inert type) and her dominant , meddlesome mother . Into this midst comes the flamboyant lover Walter Klemmer, a man who sneaks entry as a student of Erika with an intention to have sex with her. The journey is precipitous and gains volcanic energy towards the end.

I have made many highlights of captivating passages and sentences in my copy of the book. Here are a few:

“Erika is carried along like a dribble of spit on a thin stream of maternal enthusiasm”

“At home, a mild reproach from her mother descends upon the warm incubator that the two of them inhabit. Hopefully, Erika didn't catch cold during her trip (she fibs about the destination). The daughter slips into a warm bathrobe. She and her mother eat a duck stuffed with chestnuts
and other goodies. This is a banquet. The chestnuts are bursting through the seams of the duck; Mother has gilded the lily, as is her wont. The salt and pepper shakers are silver-plated, the silverware is pure silver. The child's got red cheeks today, Mother is delighted. Hopefully, the red cheeks aren't due to fever. Mother probes Erika's forehead with her lips. Erika gets a thermometer along with the dessert. Luckily, fever is crossed off as a possible cause. Erika is in the pink of health a well-nourished fish in her mother's amniotic fluid.”

“She does not see the person in him, she sees only the musician; she does not look at him, and he is to realize that he means nothing to her. But on the inside, she almost burns up. Her wick burns brighter than a thousand suns, focusing on the rancid rat known as her genital.”

“If a female colleague at the conservatory takes Erika's arm, Erika shies away from her presumptuousness. No one is allowed to lean on Erika. Only the featherweight of art may settle on Erika, but it is always in danger of floating off at the slightest puff of air and settling somewhere else.”

“The powerful magnet of domestic silence, interlaced with the sound of the TV (that center of absolute rest and inertia), is turning into physical pain inside her. Klemmer should just shove off! Why does he keep talking and talking here, while the water keeps boiling at home until the kitchen ceiling turns moldy?

The tip of Klemmer's shoe nervously ruins the inlaid floor as he blows out the small, super important realities of keyboard technique like smoke rings into the air. Meanwhile, the woman longs to go home. Klemmer asks what constitutes sound, and then answers his own question: the touch, the approach. His mouth discharges a torrent of words: that shadowy, intangible remnant made up of sound, color, light. No, no, the things on your list do not constitute music as I know it, chirps Erika, the cricket, who wants to get back to her warm hearth. You're wrong, that and that alone is music, the young man erupts. For me, the criteria of art are the imponderables, the immea-surables. Klemmer's dictum contradicts the teacher. Erika closes the piano lid, pushes objects around.

The man has chanced upon Schubert on some mental shelf, and he instantly exploits his find. The more Schubert's spirit dissolves in smoke, scent, color, thought, the more indescribable his value. His value grows to gigantic proportions, beyond understanding. Shadow is far superior to substance, states Klemmer. Why, reality is probably one of the greatest errors in the world. Hence, lies go before truth, the man concludes from his own words. The unreal comes before the real. And that enhances the quality of art.”

I strongly recommend to try this novel if you haven’t read anything by Elfriede Jelinek. I am now eagerly looking forward to watch the film by the great director Michael Haneke.

The film is amazing. I started with other Jelinek only so as to avoid redundancy, but I really do need to get back to The Piano Teacher in novel form soon.

Wonderful, Wonderful times is jammed with excellently epigramatic single lines, but, to me, really weirdly distancing as narrative. I loved it sentence by sentence but found that I had a hard time getting into as a whole after the initial burst of intrigue. Which just makes me want to try another of hers soon instead.

Nathan wrote: "I have also read The Piano Teacher, and I thought it was great. I'm curious about Wonderful, Wonderful Times and Women as Lovers. Does anyone have opinions on either?"

My review of the piano teacher here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I'll be bold enough to quote my 'bottom line':

If I were to rate the novel according to my enjoyment factor, I would rate it one star, because as a few friends have said, this book is ugly in almost every aspect. If I were to rate it as an intelligent, uncompromising attack on certain aspects of Germanic society, and a hyper-realist look at Jelinek's own situation in life, and an insightful and heart-wrenching exposè of some of the possible causes of sadomasochistic and self-harming behaviour, as well as an uncompromising look into the pain of a damaged person, I'd give it 5 stars.

As it is, I think I'm inclined to give it something in between. I have to take at least one star off for the ugliness, for having had to live through the experience of Jelinek forcing me to look through those darkly stained glasses through which Mother makes us look at the world.
I think Jelinek would understand.