that's a whole lotta

[Invicta_Toon 0]

motherfucker

[The Fish 11126]

to redress the Balance

Literary Review

 

Carole Angier

A JOKER IN THE DARK

Greed

By Elfriede Jelinek (Translated by Martin Chalmers) (Serpent's Tail 340pp £15)

 

If you have read Elfriede Jelinek's most famous novel, The Piano Teacher, you'll know what to expect from Greed. First of all, pathological characters, rendered with glassy fury: traditional Austrian self-hatred, like that of Kraus, Canetti and Bernhard, but - I know it's hard to imagine - even more hateful. Second, something you don't find even in them: a great deal of violent, sado-masochistic, four-letter sex. In sum, a horrifying vision of human nature ('friends, that is, greedy beasts') and nature itself ('fundamentally evil'), in which human beings are objects, and objects are human - days stretch their limbs, valleys grin, handkerchiefs 'are quite stiff from everything they've had to swallow in their lives'.

 

Get the flavour? (Sorry, the rub-it-in style is catching.) Disgusting, despairing, but undeniably intriguing, and not just because of the porn. That last quote is a clue: Jelinek's pages pullulate with weird but wonderful lines that only she could have written. So, time 'runs off as soon as it sees us', wind is 'this nothing in the air', and a person is 'this living human shaft ... this breathing pit'. Sometimes her aperçus are so odd you don't know what they mean; sometimes they're almost normal (single people's faces 'are like unentered rooms, which are waiting for someone to switch on the light, so that they don't have to do it themselves any more'). And often - no, almost always - they are funny. Only Jelinek-funny, of course, ie grotesque, or cruel; funny because they're grotesque and cruel, like Swift's A Modest Proposal. For example, a man shoots his family in the face, 'but they didn't need their faces after that anyway'; or (my favourite) 'Your figure has problems with its figure. Look at your hips, they shouldn't be there, they should be closer to you, they could easily come two inches closer together.' Jelinek is famous for her seriousness, metaphysical, political, ecological. But she is really a comic writer, like Beckett: a joker in the dark.

 

Greed is funnier than The Piano Teacher, and in that way it is greater Jelinek. But it is also much more obscure. The Piano Teacher's narrative was mad but clear: a perverse love triangle between a controlling mother, a crazed daughter and her callow young student. In Greed the clarity has gone and only the madness remains. It is the stream of consciousness of an unidentified narrator, who alternates her obsessive theme (women want love, men want property) with other obsessive riffs, eg dozens of pages about a ghastly artificial lake, a plant grave, and soon a human one; who constantly breaks off to address us riskily about her writing ('You can complain all you like about boredom, while you're reading this, but please not to me'); who above all surgically exposes her characters' solipsism, but never lets them escape her own, as though she were the controlling mother of The Piano Teacher.

 

There is a story, not unlike the story of The Piano Teacher, in fact: a last attempt at love by an ageing woman with the wrong man, a handsome sporty type rather like the piano teacher's student, a decade or two on. But it's later now ('One day it will be too late, how often have I written this sentence, and it's still good,' says the narrator), and everything is worse. Kurt only wants Gerti's house. Really he hates and fears women, and lusts after young men. He beats and buggers Gerti (often), then betrays her with a young girl, Gabi, whom finally he murders. Gerti returns to Vienna and commits suicide. Probably, then, Kurt gets away with murder - with two murders, in effect; and there've been other dead women before. I wasn't sure if Kurt killed them, or some other man, but the message is clear: women want love, marriage and punishment, from any man at all, by the end; and the only one of these they are certain to get is punishment. 'Silly cows, women,' the narrator says, 'especially educated ones.' This is an old story to have to excavate from her ramblings, but it's true enough. So is it worth it, and is Jelinek worth her Nobel Prize? Yes: for those weird and wonderful lines, and for those jokes in the dark. Just.

[catmag 337]

Just a hunch, but I'm guessing that's not one for me to open here at work?

[Walliver 0]

...HISTORY!

[smudger 0]

Crude but accurate