Lust

by Elfriede Jelinek

Book Overview

In a quaint Austrian ski resort, things are not quite what they seem. Hermann, the manager of a paper mill, has decided that sexual gratification begins at home. Which means Gerti - his wife and property. Gerti is not asked how she feels about the use Hermann puts her to. She is a receptacle into which Hermann pours his juices, nastily, briefly, brutally. The long-suffering and battered Gerti thinks she has found her saviour and love in Michael, a...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1852421835
• ISBN13: 9781852421830
• Release Date: March 1992
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Length: 208 Pages
• Weight: 0.38 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 7.3"

Customer Reviews

Lust is nihilistic

Incredibly difficult. To read. And at times impossible to comb out meanings. Metaphors on top of metaphors. Spiraling out to the limited edge of an intensely debauched world. Must be able to stomach oppression well. Offers death and sex different, but same treatments. Not a book for everyone. Critics of Lust criticize its nauseating repetition. True to some extent. But the repetition has a forced of its own, and with a great deal of patience and discipline, the repetition bears beautiful fruits. The dance of oppression, erotica, and abuse like a literary machine can't be swallowed with ease. Mastication is difficult. Elfriede Jelinek ought to be applauded for her intense focus and extraordinary manhandling of the difficult subject of Lust. Some favorite excerpts from the book (brilliant prose): "If you ask me, postcards treat landscape more sparingly than time treats women." -p.134 "Her thighs under the panty-hose are sticky with the Direktor's daily slime. He likes to show that he could duplicate himself if he wanted, even if there's not much ink in his machine any more." -p. 135 "And there they go, leafing through the catalogues of exotic women, high performance models that are more economical to run and need less fuel." -p.93 "Many have to take terrible buses and regret it terribly where they remain on the wrong genitals for too long."-p.89

Of Possesion

There is a certain kind of uncomfortable silence when someone mentions Elfriede Jelinek, especially in a circle of literary critics, authors and most of all Austrians. Not so much of femme fatale but more like a destructor of modern pre-concepts of society. As it happens, no one likes destructor very much. Of grassy highlands and pictoresque little towns of Austria remained bleak destruction of every cliche out there. There are no "fine" ladies anymore which love theirs husbands and whose husband love them. There are no sweet children playing in the garden obeying their parents, being sweet as kids are supposed to be. Austria form the postcard doesen't exist. Nor it has ever existed. In the shapeless cloud that became Austria, there are much to be done yet. One of those things is setting the nature of man-woman relationship in the right place. What would one happen nowadays? Well one does not get it. For Jelinek, women is piece of meat, and as meat she has to have its owner. And, naturally it is her husband. To destroy something that exist one has to try living inside it. There were much talk of kind of language used in this novel. Some of it was aimed towards high pornographical value of it. So it is. But, in a words of Elfriede Jelinek "only man is able to produce pornography". Constant repetitions of sexually explicit (I almost said lyrics) scenes is mere mechanism of their destruciton. Maybe it is true that this novel lacks a plot or any kind of interesting narrative. And because of it some may find it boring. But, what remains of highly "engaged" text is great passion "to fix wrongness" in world. And to do that one has to be, in Jelineks own words, banished into the sidelines ("im abseits"). To be read and be thinked upon

Not about Capitalism.

In spite of the her mastery of seamless metaphor, pithy wit and clever turn of phrase, it has be concluded by page 43: this book needs a huge amount of editing and structural modification to make it a satisfactory read, from anybody’s point-of-view. It’s just so unnecessarily and relentlessly repetitive. Farther on, many of the jump-cuts simply don’t make sense with respect to their purpose. And there are too many occasions in which the elegance of her language is abandoned for a dead straight statement, about Herman’s or Michael’s conduct. And it would have been a lot better to refer to ‘the woman’ as Gerti and the Direktor as Herman, throughout. Some commentators make the erroneous assertion that this is an indictment of Capitalism. This is not true. It is an indictment of gangsterism and the inability of those under such a tyrannical regime to progress towards Capitalism. Nobel Prize Winner Elfriede Jelinek is obviously a very talented writer. But Lust does not do her talents any favours. Despite that, it deserves a high mark for skillful prose.