One of Elena Ferrante's Top 40 Best Books by WomenErika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory by day. By night she trawls the city's porn shows while her mother,whom she loves and hates in equal measure,waits up for her. Into this emotional pressure-cooker bounds music student and ladies'man Walter Klemmer.With Walter as her student,Erika spirals out of control,consumed by the ecstasy of self-destruction. A haunting tale of morbid voyeurism and masochism,The Piano Teacher,first published in 1983,is Elfreide Jelinek's Masterpiece.Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize For Literature in 2004 for her'musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that,with extraordinary linguistic zeal,reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power.The Piano Teacher was adapted into an internationally successful film by Michael Haneke,which won three major prizes at Cannes,including the Grand Prize and Best Actress for Isabelle Huppert.
MEDIA REVIEWS
Publisher: Profile Books LtdISBN: 9781781255681Number of pages: 288Weight: 240 gDimensions: 196 x 128 x 22 mmEdition: Main - Classic edition
MEDIA REVIEWS
In this demented love story the hunter is the hunted,pain is pleasure,and spite and self-contempt seep from every pore.As a portrait of repressed female sexuality and a damaged psyche,The Piano Teacher glitters dangerouslySome may find Ms Jelinek's ruthlessly unsentimental approach - not to mention her image of Vienna as a bleak city of porno shops,poor immigrants and loveless copulations - too much to take. Her picture of a passive woman who can gain control over her life only by becoming a victim is truly frightening. Less squeamish readers will extract a feminist message: in a society such as this,how else can a woman like Erika behaveHeavily symbolic and bleakly realistic,The Piano Teacher turns its female heroine,Erika Kobut,into an extended metaphor for a doomed society... Passionately political under its dense mantle of sexual imagery,the novel shares the dark world view long common to Eastern European literature and now increasingly evident in books from ostensibly more fortunate countries,insistently calling our attention to the discrepancy between the Vienna of our fantasies and the one in which Jelinek livesA brilliant,deadly bookA dazzling performance that will make the blood run coldThe Piano Teacher is an astounding bookThere are some horrifically crazed laughs to be had at the antics of mother and daughter trapped in their domestic hellJelinek's expressionistic language indulges with lethal intensityJelinek's fragmented style blurs reality and imagination,creating a harsh,expressionistic picture of sexualityA brilliant,bitter,wonderful portrait of mother and daughter,artist and loverA startling novel... eloquent,intelligent and deeply unsettling; the polar opposite of pornography.Terrifyingly powerful
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