The most popular work from provocative Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher is a searing portrait of a woman bound between a repressive society and her darkest desires.
Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the prestigious and formal Vienna Conservatory, who still lives with her domineering and possessive mother. Her life appears boring, but Erika, a quiet thirty-eight-year-old, secretly visits Turkish peep shows at night and watched sadomasochistic films. Meanwhile, a handsome, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old student has become enamored with Erika and sets out to seduce her. She resists him at first—but then the dark passions roiling under the piano teacher’s subdued exterior explode in a release of perversity, violence, and degradation.
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 Böll Prize for her contribution to German literature. The film of The Piano Teacher by Michael Haneke won the three main prizes at Cannes in 2001. In 2004, Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In this demented love story the hunter is the hunted, pain is pleasure, and spite and self-contempt seep from every pore. ― Guardian
As a portrait of repressed female sexuality and a damaged psyche, The Piano Teacher glitters dangerously ― Observer
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
Heavily symbolic and bleakly realistic, The Piano Teacher turns its female heroine, Erika Kobut, into an extended metaphor for a doomed society... 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
A brilliant, deadly book -- Elizabeth Young
A dazzling performance that will make the blood run cold -- Walter Abish
The Piano Teacher is an astounding book ― Sunday Herald
There are some horrifically crazed laughs to be had at the antics of mother and daughter trapped in their domestic hell ― Irish Times
Jelinek's expressionistic language indulges with lethal intensity ― Metro
Jelinek's fragmented style blurs reality and imagination, creating a harsh, expressionistic picture of sexuality ― Scotland on Sunday
A brilliant, bitter, wonderful portrait of mother and daughter, artist and lover ― John Hawkes
A startling novel... eloquent, intelligent and deeply unsettling; the polar opposite of pornography. -- Arifa Akbar ― Independent
