About the Author

Elfriede Jelinek was born in Austria in 1946 and grew up in Vienna where she attended the famous Music Conservatory. The leading Austrian writer of her generation, she has been awarded the Heinrich B ll Prize for her contribution to German literature. The film by Michael Haneke of The Piano Teacher won the three main prizes at Cannes in 2001. In 2004, Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Reviews

A dazzling performance that will make the blood run cold
*but Jelinek?s ability to disturb and provoke remains undiminished? Herald*

Some 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 behave?
*New York Times Book Review*

In this demented love story the hunter is the hunted, pain is pleasure, and spite and self-contempt seep from every pore.
*The Guardian*

Heavily symbolic and bleakly realistic, The Piano Teacher turns its female heroin, Erika Kobut, into an extended metaphor for a doomed society... compelling fiction, ensnaring the reader with the intensity of the author's vision and the bitter irony she uses to present her view of the city... 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 lives
*yet is clinically precise? Le Monde*

A dazzling performance that will make the blood run cold -- Walter Abish ?A brilliant, deadly book? Elizabeth Young ?A brilliant, bitter, wonderful portrait of mother and daughter, artist and lover? John Hawkes ?Elfriede Jelinek won this year?s Nobel Prize for Literature. Her novel The Piano Teacher is an astou * but Jelinek?s ability to disturb and provoke remains undiminished? Herald *
Some 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 behave? * New York Times Book Review *
In this demented love story the hunter is the hunted, pain is pleasure, and spite and self-contempt seep from every pore. * The Guardian *
Heavily symbolic and bleakly realistic, The Piano Teacher turns its female heroin, Erika Kobut, into an extended metaphor for a doomed society... compelling fiction, ensnaring the reader with the intensity of the author's vision and the bitter irony she uses to present her view of the city... 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 lives -- Los Angeles Times ?With formidable power, intelligence and skill she draws on the full arsenal of derision. Her dense writing is obsessive almost to the point of being unbearable. It hits you in the guts * yet is clinically precise? Le Monde *

Sexuality and violence are coupled in this brilliant, uncompromising book set in modern-day Vienna, by the winner of the 1986 Heinrich Boll Prize. Erika Kohut, a spinster in her mid-30s, has been selected by her domineering mother to be sacrificed on the altar of art. Carefully groomed and trained, she's unfortunately not gifted enough to become a concert pianist. Instead, she teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory. She still lives at home, and in the eyes of the world is the dutiful daughter. But there's another, perversely sexual side of Erika that she finds difficult to repress. She goes to a peep show, frequents the local park where Turks and Serbo-Croats pick up women and, just for kicks, slices herself with a razor. When one of her students, Walter Klemmer, falls in love with her, Erika demands sadomasochistic rituals before she'll agree to sleep with him. While the subject matter is deliberately perverse, Jelinek gets behind the cream-puff prettiness of Vienna; this novel is not for the weak of heart. Violence is a cleansing force, a point that brings back uncomfortable overtones of an Austria 50 years ago. (October)