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Product Description
Product Description
In a quaint Austrian ski resort, things are not quite what they seem. Hermann, the manager of a paper mill, has decided that sexual gratification begins at home. Which means Gerti - his wife and property. Gerti is not asked how she feels about the use Hermann puts her to. She is a receptacle into which Hermann pours his juices, nastily, briefly, brutally. The long-suffering and battered Gerti thinks she has found her saviour and love in Michael, a student who rescues her after a day of vigorous use by her husband. But Michael is on his way up the Austrian political ladder, and he is, after all, a man.
About the Author
Elfriede Jelinek was born in Austria in 1946 and grew up in Vienna where she attended the famous Music Conservatory. The leading Austrian writer of her generation, she has been awarded the Heinrich Böll Prize for her contribution to German literature. The film by Michael Haneke of The Piano Teacher won the three main prizes at Cannes in 2001. In 2004, Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
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First Sentence
CURTAINS VEIL THE WOMAN in her house from the rest. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
CURTAINS VEIL THE WOMAN in her house from the rest. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you liked the Swans, Bernhard, Bukowski, or Houellebecq etc you won't be disappointed. She won a Nobel prize, she must be doing something worthwhile! 'for her musical flow of voices and counter voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power'.
One of my favourites, but don't come expecting some parlour games.
One of my favourites, but don't come expecting some parlour games.
7 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This relentless stream of brutal sexual gymnastics ('the penal colony of sex') circles around Man (no name), his sexual object (his wife), their child ('progenitorial profit') and the wife's would-be lover.
This principal menu is dressed with cheap anticapitalist rhetoric.
The logical conclusion of this book is the extinction of mankind, preponderantly for sexual reasons, and cardinally because of Man, 'that irreconciliable enemy of her sex', who considers his wife as a 'jar to p* in' and sex as 'emptying a dustbag'.
This book is a disgusting rage against mankind, heavy shooting with very serious collateral damage. Everything and everybody is yelled at: her dear fellow Austrians, her native village, Catholic Austria, the Pope ('the immortal souls of the unemployed whose number increaseth year by year as the Pope commandeth'), sports ('Silly Old Sally of an Olympian idea of humanity'), the prolets ('workers eating their wurst and waiting for the worst'), food ('poisonous cheese, rotten dairy products') with human digestion considered as a sewage system, even the seasons ('cut them down to dirty heaps as does winter the landscape').
However, the author contradicts herself fundamentally: there is Man, but 'no two human beings are alike'.
The ultimate result of this caricatural SM jeremiade is boring Grand Guignol: 'Nothing but those lights caresses the wretched bodies shamelessly confronting us in all their morning stench and exhaust fumes.'
No wonder that the author concludes: 'What people live on apart from their hope, is a mystery to me. Once the act of purchasing is accomplished, everything is really over.'
But for some, everything is not over: they read E. Jelinek, or better, listen to Mozart.
This book is only for those interested in a life view seen through extremely dark spectacles.
Five stars for the courage of the translator.
This principal menu is dressed with cheap anticapitalist rhetoric.
The logical conclusion of this book is the extinction of mankind, preponderantly for sexual reasons, and cardinally because of Man, 'that irreconciliable enemy of her sex', who considers his wife as a 'jar to p* in' and sex as 'emptying a dustbag'.
This book is a disgusting rage against mankind, heavy shooting with very serious collateral damage. Everything and everybody is yelled at: her dear fellow Austrians, her native village, Catholic Austria, the Pope ('the immortal souls of the unemployed whose number increaseth year by year as the Pope commandeth'), sports ('Silly Old Sally of an Olympian idea of humanity'), the prolets ('workers eating their wurst and waiting for the worst'), food ('poisonous cheese, rotten dairy products') with human digestion considered as a sewage system, even the seasons ('cut them down to dirty heaps as does winter the landscape').
However, the author contradicts herself fundamentally: there is Man, but 'no two human beings are alike'.
The ultimate result of this caricatural SM jeremiade is boring Grand Guignol: 'Nothing but those lights caresses the wretched bodies shamelessly confronting us in all their morning stench and exhaust fumes.'
No wonder that the author concludes: 'What people live on apart from their hope, is a mystery to me. Once the act of purchasing is accomplished, everything is really over.'
But for some, everything is not over: they read E. Jelinek, or better, listen to Mozart.
This book is only for those interested in a life view seen through extremely dark spectacles.
Five stars for the courage of the translator.
2 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I'm half way through this book and am struggling, seriously. I can't seem to find any coherent flow or dialogue holding the book together. I really can't see the end game in a book so dark and full of despair. The flow is nauseating to say the least. I'm not sure if I can finish it, which is something I can say about only a handful of books.
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