![]() 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. ![]() ![]() 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.Įrika 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. 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. ![]() The English-language debut of the winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature astonishes with biting social commentary and linguistic prowess. ![]()
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