The Piano Teacher in Read a book from each country

Apr 22, 2016 Meg rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: translation, literary, 20th-century, literature-of-western-europe, attr-depressing, women-write-women, style-lyrical, attr-atmospheric, genre-contemporary, language-german

This book was... grotesque, disgusting, utterly vile. I wouldn't recommend this book casually because the reading experience was just that unpleasant. The Piano Teacher entraps you in its misery, its misanthropy, its tale of perversion and abuse, and makes you somehow complicit in the ugliness and malice in the world. Maybe it was masochistic on my part to keep reading, but I think there was something oddly magnetic about this book, despite being full of such grotesqueries. It repels and enthral This book was... grotesque, disgusting, utterly vile. I wouldn't recommend this book casually because the reading experience was just that unpleasant. The Piano Teacher entraps you in its misery, its misanthropy, its tale of perversion and abuse, and makes you somehow complicit in the ugliness and malice in the world. Maybe it was masochistic on my part to keep reading, but I think there was something oddly magnetic about this book, despite being full of such grotesqueries. It repels and enthralls in equal measure.

Maybe because I am also listening to a lecture series on the Aesthetics of Art, reading this book made me wonder how this can be Art and the main reason Jelinek won the Nobel Prize in Literature, when beauty is so often seen as prerequisite for Art. There is no pleasure, joy, or moral lesson you can glean from this book; it is not beautiful, but rather, calculatingly foul. It doesn't comfort you; rather it disturbs you, seeking to make you feel disgust and hopelessness. How can this be Art? How can I, after an deeply unpleasant reading experience, still think this was a good book? I'm not sure. There's a certain technical virtuosity in the writing, in the rhythms and structure (Jelinek's training in music has transferred to her writing). It is full of emotion and insight, even if those emotions and insights are unbearable and painful. It is gruesome but somehow manages to avoid becoming something that exists only to shock; the shock is not the aim, but a side effect. There is a searing vividness to it; even though it's set in the real world, Jelinek has created a secondary world as distinctive as any I've ever come across - it feels like a series of paintings, with a color palette of black and grey shot through with orange--the closest I can think of is something like Goya's Black Paintings (especially Saturn Devouring his Son-- transposed to The Piano Teacher we'd call it a study of Mother/Art devouring Erika) if only the subjects were painted more abstractly as geometric parts, deprived of the basic dignity of a recognizable human body.

Lack of dignity, lack of love, lack of hope...there are a lot of things missing from Erika's life, a life full of music but otherwise empty of any beauty or meaning, things we traditionally think music should bring. As Jelinek points out: "....[a]rt is credited with many things, especially an ability to offer solace. Sometimes, of course, art creates the suffering in the first place."

I'm really not sure what to make of this book. I need to mull it over. But it's such a relief to be finished reading it, a weight off my soul. "Thank god!" is what I thought when I turned the last page, I kid you not. ...more

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Sep 03, 2011 Julia rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: nobel, austrian

Elfriede Jelinek bringt in der "Klavierspielerin" das Österreich der Fritzls, von Natascha Kampusch und der nach solchen Stories hechelnden Kronen-Zeitung erschreckend auf den Punkt. Der Leser riecht die Schnitzel, welche die Mutter in der kleinen peinlich-sauberen und trotzdem ranzigen Wiener Wohnung für die ihr hörige Tochter klopft, er sieht die unschönen Kopulierungen im Prater und riecht das getrocknete Sperma auf den getrockneten Papiertaschentüchern, die sich am Boden einer Peep-Show Kabi ...more

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