Arnon Grunberg

1946

Chemist

On Jelinek - Becca Rothfeld in LRB:

“Elfriede Jelinek’s eleven novels and more than twenty plays have few plausible characters and even fewer parsable plots. When she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2004, the committee praised ‘her musical flow of voices and counter-voices’, which ‘reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power’. This is a polite way of saying that she delights in denying her audience traditional consolations: human encounters, a sense of narrative possibility. Instead, she deploys words for words’ sake. In a fragment from 1983, she dreamed of a piece of theatre without actors, a play like ‘a fashion show’ in which ‘one could ... send out the clothes by themselves.’ Her work is an attempt to stage such a depopulated performance. ‘My characters are only coat-hangers on which I hang the language,’ she has said.
Jelinek was born in Austria in 1946. Her father, a Jewish chemist whose work was deemed important enough to spare him the camps, ended up in a mental asylum after the war. Her mother, a domineering Catholic with outsized ambitions for her children, enrolled Jelinek in convent school and then at the Vienna Conservatory to study the organ. ‘Mother is an absolute ruler,’ Jelinek wrote in The Piano Teacher (1983), a text she acknowledges as autobiographical. ‘There is only one possibility for the child: the top of the world.’ In 1968, aged 21, Jelinek had a mental breakdown and retreated to her parents’ house for a year. When she emerged, she had abandoned music in favour of writing.”

(…)

“The characters in Women as Lovers are schemas, not people. The chapter in which Paula first appears is titled ‘the example of paula’, and Jelinek emphasises that Brigitte and her dependable husband ‘are not out of the ordinary. they are simply symptomatic of everything that is not out of the ordinary.’ Indeed, they are archetypes. ‘at the end of their youth the young men take a hard-working thrifty woman into the house,’ Jelinek observes. ‘end of youth. beginning of old age. for the woman end of life and start of having children’. For Brigitte and Paula, patriarchal customs acquire the force of natural laws.”

(…)

“Jelinek’s admirers often compare her to Karl Kraus and Thomas Bernhard. (She has insisted on more than one occasion that she is a ‘provincial’, inextricable from her country and its colloquialisms.) But the writer to whom she bears the closest resemblance is not one of her compatriots. ‘Never has the spray of speech as it is actually spoken so drenched the reader to the bone,’ Walter Benjamin wrote of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). It is a braying novel that echoes with snatches of conversation, music wafting from windows and animals shrieking on their way to the slaughterhouse. Both Döblin and Jelinek understand the novel as a collage of sounds. Who is speaking in Berlin Alexanderplatz? Sometimes a character, but just as often a city, a street, a situation.”

(…)

“A hotel, Jelinek reminds us, is a non-home that imitates a home. The Alpenrose, which tries so hard to be homely, is caught in limbo between life and death – between the uncanny and the familiar, between remembering and repressing.”

(…)

“In Jelinek’s dystopia, even the final indignity does not matter: the dead do not stay dead.”

Read the article here.

Yes, Rothfeld makes some valid points.

But she omits to mention Jelinek’s sense of humor.

She doesn’t do justice to Jelinel’s most successful novel as a novel The Piano Teacher. (I’m not sure wheter Rothfeld was able to read Jelinek in German.)
Lust is more a long poem than a novel, but the language itself is never dull or trite.
Again, maybe we have a translation problem.

De Sade is also repetitive and sometimes dull. Or, dull, less exciting than you thought he would be.

The comparison with Döblin is interesting, back to Döblin.

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