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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk
Women as Lovers is a compelling early novel from the 2004 Nobel Prize winner, Elfriede Jelinek. Originally published in 1975, the story of two women, Paula and Brigitte, as they grow up and start families in a small Austrian town, is anything but picture postcard pretty. But if you relish innovative, adventurous writing, you will be stunned by what Jelinek achieves with a very simple plot.
The characterisation contrasts Paula, who follows her dreams rather than conforming, with Brigitte, who puts up with the pig Heinz, because he is on his way to owning his own small business. This surprisingly dualistic scheme recalls a novel like Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund. Jelinek’s clear dissection and comparison of lives, and of a grim society we can only hope is disappearing, has a mathematical beauty to it. She plays with this mirroring of lives, and satire is never far away. At times the narrative voice sounds like that of a staid government film on life in the provinces; at times it seems we are privy to platitudes and local folk sayings. Yet what we hear would never be heard in a proverb or official documentary, it is far too bleakly true. There are also passages of hilarious cartoon exaggeration, where Jelinek’s theatrical skills liven up normally mundane activities like nappy-changing and tea-serving.
Without wishing to reveal too much of the slight plot, this book has to be recommended for its strong, beautiful writing and its brutal honesty. It packs a punch. For romanticisers in particular, this is vital reading. --Stefan Tobler
Product Description
The setting is an idyllic Alpine village where a woman?s underwear factory nestles in the woods. Two factory workers, Brigitte and Paula, dream and talk about finding happiness, a comfortable home and a good man. They realize that their quest will be as hard as work at the factory. Brigitte subordinates her feelings and goes for for Heinz, a young, plump, up-and-coming businessman. With Paula, feelings and dreams become confused. She gets pregnant by Erich, the forestry worker. He?s handsome, so they marry. Brigitte gets it right. Paula gets it wrong. Using the conventions and language of romantic fiction, Elfriede Jelinek has written a moving tragedy whose power lies in its refusal to take at face value its characters? dreams and aspirations.
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do you know this BEAUTIFUL land with its valleys and hills? Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
do you know this BEAUTIFUL land with its valleys and hills? Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Jelinek offers an insight into the Marxist idea of women as interchangeable objects in a market which is controlled by men. Jelinek may be described as a feminist writer but this novel shows not only the struggle of women but the men. Overall an interesting read.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4 reviews
117 of 132 people found the following review helpful
need to be austrian?
14 May 2002
Format:Paperback
I HAD to add this in reaction to the published review. It might be hard for Americans to admit that all the depicted hopelessness, sexism and pointlessness exists in relationships, not only in Austria. We WISH it wouldn't, but it does. And the fact, that we have such a hard time admitting it is all the more reason for this book exist and be read.
I have come across the very same relationship patterns in the U.S., it's just the way this culture deals with it, that makes it hard for writers like Elfriede Jelinek to get the appreciation they deservre.
I have come across the very same relationship patterns in the U.S., it's just the way this culture deals with it, that makes it hard for writers like Elfriede Jelinek to get the appreciation they deservre.
21 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Deep psichology of modern time
26 Mar 2006
Format:Paperback
To you out there, who perchance have never lived in smaller towns or villages of Europe (though I would dare to say that situation described here is pretty much the same everywhere), the world described in this novel of Elfriede Jelinek may feel awfull strange. Allmost impossible. We live and grow in "advanced" civilisation, we educate ourselves, attend to schools, feel free to question world around us and finaly, we refuse to be bound by that same world more than is necessary (or yet we perceive it that way). But believe it or not, in the same planet that we ourselves live in, there exist not so small community of Elfriede Jelinek's characters from this book.
There is a world without "prospect", with a church in the center of town, and one factory, owner of which is like a modern day dictator...as I write this down, it reminds me a lot of Simpson's Springfield. But without loveable characters, without joy of life, with only bare reality that is left and which we must satisfy ourselves with.
In their quest for identity, for happinnes, Jelinek's characters conduct themselves in a narrow world, trying to become queens in a small world, which, in a brilliant irony, does not care for queens at all. Only kings play their role which must be fulfilled and never questioned. To question would mean that one denies tradition and that one feels himself above the rest. As you may guess, that will not be allowed.
This is the first book of Elfriede Jelinek and in many things it stands for what shall later be known as her own writing style. That peculiar dark grey colouring of the world outside just starts to shape itself here, but her narrative discourse still doesn't concern itself with principles of relation man-woman in a magnitude that it does in later work.
This is very good book, one which shall introduce you to universe where only rare individulas would like to dwell. If you are already introduced, it will do you good to remind yourself...
There is a world without "prospect", with a church in the center of town, and one factory, owner of which is like a modern day dictator...as I write this down, it reminds me a lot of Simpson's Springfield. But without loveable characters, without joy of life, with only bare reality that is left and which we must satisfy ourselves with.
In their quest for identity, for happinnes, Jelinek's characters conduct themselves in a narrow world, trying to become queens in a small world, which, in a brilliant irony, does not care for queens at all. Only kings play their role which must be fulfilled and never questioned. To question would mean that one denies tradition and that one feels himself above the rest. As you may guess, that will not be allowed.
This is the first book of Elfriede Jelinek and in many things it stands for what shall later be known as her own writing style. That peculiar dark grey colouring of the world outside just starts to shape itself here, but her narrative discourse still doesn't concern itself with principles of relation man-woman in a magnitude that it does in later work.
This is very good book, one which shall introduce you to universe where only rare individulas would like to dwell. If you are already introduced, it will do you good to remind yourself...
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Riffing on Pasolini
21 Mar 2011
Format:Paperback
Agree with Harald that the Publisher's Weekly review is so infantile in its analysis of this powerful novel that I just had to write another view. Far from being "oddly punctuated, repetitive prose" it uses allegorical tone and leitmotif to invoke a universal stage for its timeless message on the war of the sexes. It is also far from being "reminiscent of Gertrude Stein but lacking Stein's energetic compassion". It is instead archly intellectual applying the post-modernistic tone of Pasolini's Teorema with the fairy-tale horror of Robert Coover. As a voracious, omniverous reader who is interested in everything from Virgina Woolf and Margeurite Duras to the boys-club novels of Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy, I'm telling you do not miss this book.
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