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We follow a late 30-ish woman, Erika, in Vienna. She's a piano teacher ruthlessly controlled by her mother with whom she still lives. Into her life comes a young man, a student of the fine arts she teaches. Perhaps one cannot say he upsets her life, but through this man's encounter with Erika we get to discover some truly unsettling truths about this woman's psyche, relating to sexual identity more than anything. The relationship between Erika and her dominant mother is also an intricate part of the story.
More than anything the language of Jelinek is truly wonderful, like an intricate melody. Might sound like something I am saying to appear clever, but it's not. She knows her alliterations very well and use them freely. A couple of times perhaps a bit too obviously, but most often not. The writings flows from one persons perspective into anothers without pause, line break, or anything to help you, like shadows of the characters melting into each other. Still it was not hard to follow the perspective. A few times I thought she said something only to make a comment or sound clever, that felt a bit besides the point of the story. But maybe I am being too critical. The language is still what I take with me after reading this book. It was truly amazing (even after translation), and I am definitely going to have to read more books by this author!
People with little patience beware, Jelinek can take a couple of pages to get to the climax. More than once she falls into the habit of describing the situation by looking closer at who this person is and why it is doing what it is. I wouldn't say this disturbed me, as I was amazed with the way she writes, but I really felt that I was being held away from know what's going to happen. I guess that was the point, and she managed very well to work up the suspence this way.
For me, this book was more lurid and graphic than anything by the other two writers. Jelinek takes the theme of the suppression / silencing of women and creates a character who really only finds expression in music - she is utterly incapable of using conventional modes of expression (language) to voice her thoughts and feelings, and as a result her feelings themselves become distorted - Erika doesn't know how to live as a 'normal' human, and cannot distinguish between love, lust and violence.
The book had an interesting twist in that Erika is suppressed not only by the masculine world in which she lives, but also by her (nameless) mother - when the status of 'mother' is ironically the ultimate representation of woman. The mother becomes a tyrant, subordinating her daughter's desires and very personality to her own needs because she too cannot function in the outside male-dominated world.
This book was never an easy read, or comforting, but gave me a lot to think about, particularly in our world where people (especially women) are so judged on appearances. Erika seemed to be an example of how the outside world can alienate individuals, causing them to harm themselves mentally and physically. Erika comes across as a bizarre and eccentric character, but there is a lot of truth in how Jelinek depicts her.
It deals in dark themes: a suffocating mother-daughter relationship, self-harm, voyeurism and (potentially) masochism (though it's not clear how far Erika is really looking for this).
Much of this is persuasive, telling and gripping - though I found the central plotting unclear - why does Erika want something different in her relationship with Klemmer than from her previous relationships? And what does she want? (what she says she wants or what the novelist tells us she wants?)
As to the style, I don't read German, sadly, otherwise I would have given this a go. My suspicion is that it's probably quite masterly, alert in every sentence, in the original. In the translation, it's a bit hit and miss - more hit than miss, but quite a lot of infelicities.
Overall: you won't soon forget this book if you choose to read it. Is it a masterpiece of world literature - I'm not sure. I might try to read something else by this author one day.
Trapped in an oppressive relationship with her suffocating mother, Erika Kohut treads an uneasy line between bourgeoise expectations of someone of... Read more
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