Greed
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"'Greed has considerable energy and force. Its moral urgency is beyond doubt' Independent 'Her novels evoke a hyperreality, where authentic experience is eclipsed by the recycled images of the mass media' Financial Times 'Jelinek's work is brave, adventurous, witty, antagonistic and devastatingly right about the sorriness of human existence, and her contempt is expressed with surprising chirpiness: it's a wild ride... wonderful, defiant mischief-making' Guardian 'A poetic mystery. Jelinek writes from somewhere else. She never wavers. She is steadfast... there is nothing accidental in these pages. Their darkness rings, the reader echoes. It is an enduring achievement' Scotsman"
Metro
`The real thrills lie in Jelinek's droll, penetrating insight...
through to its denouement, Greed is - like the writer herself - relentless
and remoseless' --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
through to its denouement, Greed is - like the writer herself - relentless
and remoseless' --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Greed meanders sinuously along like the Danube. The writing is witty , biting, deliciously observant; but after 100 pages of the flow with no destination in sight and a bit too much repetition, I lost interest. The stream of consciousness style began to jar. The wry observations inundated any sense of a cohesive story. Perhaps it is a smoother read in German.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Yet another Nobel Prizewinner's book. Elfriede Jelinek's Greed is supposedly her most accessible work. At least, it says on the blurb. If this is accessible, I don't know what her other novels are like. It completely defeated me. Jelinek's prose is dense, long (paragraphs extending for pages), frequently unpunctuated; it roars in places, quivers with ferocious disdain for its characters (many of whom are unnamed). Nominally, this is about a country policeman who wants to amass property and so seduces every middle-aged landowning woman in his village; there is much furious and seedy coupling and complete lack of understanding between men and women; there is a murdered girl and her mother who is often terrified by her absence and at other times relieved. I could make neither head nor tail of this novel. Perhaps it is one to be grappled with, treated as an adversary? A reviewer in the Guardian, who has no patience with people demanding easy reads, called it daredevil, risk-taking prose ("What is killing the novel is people's growing dependence on feel-good fiction, fantasy and non-fiction. With this comes an inability or unwillingness to tolerate any irregularities of form, a prissy quibbling over capital letters, punctiliousness about punctuation. They act like we're still at school! Real writing is not about rules. It's about electrifying prose, it's about play.") But I made no headway. If any of you read it and understand it, please be sure to explain it all to me.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
7 reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Impenetrable and Densely Wrought Analysis of Sordid Austria
27 Jun 2009
Format:Hardcover
Yet another Nobel Prizewinner's book. Elfriede Jelinek's Greed is supposedly her most accessible work. At least, it says on the blurb. If this is accessible, I don't know what her other novels are like. It completely defeated me. Jelinek's prose is dense, long (paragraphs extending for pages), frequently unpunctuated; it roars in places, quivers with ferocious disdain for its characters (many of whom are unnamed). Nominally, this is about a country policeman who wants to amass property and so seduces every middle-aged landowning woman in his village; there is much furious and seedy coupling and complete lack of understanding between men and women; there is a murdered girl and her mother who is often terrified by her absence and at other times relieved. I could make neither head nor tail of this novel. Perhaps it is one to be grappled with, treated as an adversary? A reviewer in the Guardian, who has no patience with people demanding easy reads, called it daredevil, risk-taking prose ("What is killing the novel is people's growing dependence on feel-good fiction, fantasy and non-fiction. With this comes an inability or unwillingness to tolerate any irregularities of form, a prissy quibbling over capital letters, punctiliousness about punctuation. They act like we're still at school! Real writing is not about rules. It's about electrifying prose, it's about play.") But I made no headway. If any of you read it and understand it, please be sure to explain it all to me.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful
cumbersome writing style
7 Feb 2009
Format:Paperback
Please, someone inform me why I should slog through this. I read the description and it sounded great but I can't get past the writing style. I consider myself to be someone with a long history of reading critically but I am lost here. The run on sentences and lack of paragraphs are cumbersome. So far I can't tell what it's about, the ADD description in the earlier review seems apt in describing what the writing feels like. I really wanted to like this.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Like being in the mind of someone with ADD
3 Jan 2009
Format:Paperback
I read this book for my book club and boy was I disappointed. I don't know if it was the translation, or just the author, but this book is the worse book I've ever read. There is no character development or dialog. The sentences go on for miles without any complete thought. And just when you finish a chapter and you think you finally might understand what the heck is going on, the next chapter is about something completely different, like from an entirely different book. I would classify this style of writing as being in the mind of someone attention deficit meets narcotic addiction with a splash of Turrets. In other words, read this book if you really feel like bashing it, because that's all we did in our book club meeting :-\
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