Elfriede Jelinek's writing is nausea inducing.  Not metaphorically, but literally.  She’s the only novelist I’ve ever read whose visceral descriptions of abuse, emotionlessly violent characters and pornographic details actually me reach for something to wretch into. 

Because of her frankness and excessively disgusting details, critics either love her or hate her.  I hate her, but that doesn’t automatically invalidate her work for me. In fact, bringing out such strong feelings in readers is perhaps what every novelist should strive for. On the other hand, who is to say what makes Jelinek’s work any more valuable than other pornography? What makes it, and not that, accepted it into the literary canon? If awards do the trick, Jelinek’s got that going for her--Austrian Jelinek's work was kept to German language readers until she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004 and her work was translated into English. 

Jelinek was born in 1946 in Styria, Austria.  Part of the conflict about World War II found in the majority of her writings could stem from her unease in being a mixed-nationality child, her father was Czech and Jewish while her mother was Romanian and German.  The Jelineks escaped the Holocaust because her chemist father worked in industrial production.  This could have also created Jelinek’s harsh criticism of Austria’s Nazi past, a history that the rest of the country doesn't like to claim. During her youth, she studied piano, organ, guitar, violin and viola and went to a strict Catholic school in Vienna.  Much of her writing is very political, stemming from her work with Austria’s Communist party. She criticized Austria’s far right administration, calling it too nationalistic and authoritarian.

When Jelinek won the Nobel Prize in 2004, she said that she was pleased, but also worried that it would make her too public a figure.  She said she believed she was given the prize for being a woman, a token essentially, but that her colleague and friend Peter Handke would have been a more worthy recipient. 

Jelinek’s most famous book, Die Klavierspielerin, or The Piano Teacher, tells the story of Erika Kohut, a piano teacher at the Vienna Conservatory.  Kohut is in arrested development—she is in her late 30’s, but still shares a bed with her mother; her sexual immaturity manifests itself into voyeurism (Erika watches peep shows and pornography as she goes home from work, and urinates with excitement when she sees a couple having sex in a park). If you couldn't tell, Erika is a supremely unsympathetic character.  But neither is anyone else in the book.

The Piano Teacher is also supremely violent—Erika rips out her mothers hair when her mother tries to take away one of her new dresses and she takes large instruments on the subway so she can hit people with them and call them accidents. In addition, the central story of the novel is the relationship between Erika and her pupil, Walter Klemmer.  Klemmer becomes infatuated with her, and Erika becomes obsessed with controlling him, telling him to control her in various masochistic ways. Eventually the tension between his desire and her desire to control come to a head and Walter beats and rapes Erika in her apartment.  When Erika finds Walter after the rape, he is happy with himself and she stabs herself in the shoulder.   

Most of Jelinek’s work is perverse, perverted, violent and disgusting like The Piano Teacher. It’s difficult to separate her political activism from her personal history, her critiques of Austrian society’s moral failings from unnecessary pornographic details. I wouldn’t recommend Jelinek to anyone because I hated reading her so much, but I suppose I would say she is worth it, only to wonder what the Nobel committee was thinking and also to separate for yourself what is social commentary and what is voyeuristic trash.   

Sources and further reading:  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elfriede_Jelinek

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Klavierspielerin