Herself a philistine, she conceives of Erika as a pure and exalted artist and thus has raised her child to the very heights of arrogance. Mother wants Erika to be a genius but only to bask in the reflected glory of the prodigy she created and wholeheartedly possesses. In a way, the relationship between these two overshadows the rest of the novel as it overshadows every moment of Erika’s life and the psychological layers to their interactions are impeccably arranged.
She has a bedroom at home with neither bed nor lock on its door – she sleeps with her mother. Having failed in her career, she now teaches at the Vienna Conservatory. She’s one hell of a misanthrope and misanthropes are not easy to like.Įrika Kohut is the piano teacher, raised by a control-freak mother to be a concert pianist – this and nothing more. It’s not hard to see why she’s one of the most controversial winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature. What follows is 280 pages in the gutter of modern Vienna with the singularly wretched trio of mother, daughter and daughter’s lover using this strategy and doing their best to break each other.īy the sound of it, this is actually one of Elfriede Jelinek’s lighter novels. The other theme which drives the plot is simply this: …Mother worries a lot, for the first thing a proprietor learns, and painfully at that, is: Trust is fine, but control is better. Its buttons are bursting from the fat white paunch of culture, which, like any drowned corpse that is not fished from the water, bloats up more and more. Vienna, the city of music! Only the things that have proven their worth will continue to do so in this city. The setting is Vienna, where the seedy underbelly has risen up to permeate and eat out the rest, leaving that most romantic of European cities to be spat and pissed upon in the grave by Elfriede Jelinek’s cold-blooded, satiric narrator (though not a person, certainly a “character” in its own right).
The Piano Teacher (1983) is a series of developing but inherently stagnant scenes focused on doubled themes, each representing the other. If you find them mesmerizing, carry on and know it gets way worse. It’s all laid out in the first twelve pages and if you don’t like them, better stop right there.
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