The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek is a dark and disturbing novel that delves into the complex and twisted relationship between Erika Kohut, a middle-aged piano teacher in Vienna, and her overbearing mother. Erika's life is filled with self-harm, repressed sexuality, and a desire for control, which leads her into a sadomasochistic relationship with her student, Walter Klemmer. The narrative unfolds slowly, exploring themes of love, lust, control, and submission in a visceral and unapologetic manner, making it a challenging but compelling read that is not for the easily shocked.
The writing style of Elfriede Jelinek in The Piano Teacher is described as brilliant yet horrible, with a harsh expressionistic picture of sexuality. The narrative is compelling and compulsive, drawing readers into the strange and grotesque world of Erika and her tumultuous relationships. The book offers a disturbing but possibly realistic view of a troubled woman navigating her desires and demons, with a powerful writing style that brings poetry to dark and sticky topics, creating a train wreck of a story that is both fascinating and repulsive.
Genres:
Tropes/Plot Devices:
Topics:
Notes:
Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings
The book includes high content warnings for themes of sexual abuse, self-harm, psychological manipulation, and graphic depictions of violence.
From The Publisher:
The English-language debut of the winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature astonishes with biting social commentary and linguistic prowess.
In awarding her the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, The Swedish Academy praised Elfriede Jelinek "for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clich's and their subjugating power." In her most well-known novel, The Piano Teacher, Jelinek creates a shocking, angry, aching portrait of a society stubbornly fabricating its own obsolescence, and of a young woman whom this society has slowly fashioned into a ticking bomb. Set in a late 1980s Vienna rotting under the weight of its oppressive, outmoded cultural ideals ("which, like any drowned corpse that is not fished from the water, bloats up more and more")-a Vienna mirrored by the heroine's own repressed dreams-The Piano Teacher marks the English-language debut of a novelist of international significance.
Erika Kohut, piano teacher at the very prestigious, very stuffy Vienna Conservatory, is a quiet woman in her mid thirties devoted to Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, and her domineering mother. The two women's life together is a seamless tissue of desperate boredom, fueled by television movies, neurotic possessiveness, and hopeless dreams of a concert career whose hour has long since passed. Enter Walter Klemmer-handsome, arrogant, athletic, out to conquer the secret of art and Erika's affections with all the rancid bravado of youth-and suddenly the dark and dangerous passions roiling under the piano teacher's subdued exterior explode in a release of sexual perversity and long-buried violence.
Celebrated throughout Europe for the intensity and frankness of her writings, awarded the Heinrich B'll Prize for her outstanding contribution to German letters, Elfriede Jelinek is one of the most original and controversial writers in Austria today-a writer whose novels cut to the very heart of our deepest fears and desires.
The Piano Teacher was made into an acclaimed film by Michael Haneke in 2001.
Ratings (1)
Liked It (1) |
Reader Stats (14):
Read It (1) | |
Currently Reading (1) | |
Want To Read (10) | |
Did Not Finish (1) | |
Not Interested (1) |
What can you read after
The Piano Teacher?
About the Author:
Elfriede Jelinek was born in Mürzzuschlag, Austria, in 1946, and grew up in Vienna, where she attended the Vienna Conservatory of Music. She is the author of five other novels, a collection of poetry, a number of pieces for radio and theater, and is the German translator of Thomas Pynchon, as well as a composer and organist. Ms. Jelinek lives in Vienna and Munich. In 1986 she was awarded the prestigious Heinrich Böll Prize. Most recently she has published Der Tod und das Mädchen I-V (2003), her "princess dramas." Elfriede Jelinek won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature.
When you click the Amazon link and make a purchase, we may receive a small commision, at no cost to you.
