The Piano Teacher

by Elfriede Jelinek and Elfriede Jelineková

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802144616
• ISBN13: 9780802144614
• Release Date: October 2009
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

In her shoes.

This book depicts a woman who grew up in a company of a controlling mother, who kept her in rigid boundaries. She's been deprived of everything a normal girl has while growing up. No clothing, no games, no friends, no loving tender family. Thus she constantly has to suppress her feelings and sexual drives. This abuse forms her into a person with confused, hurt psyche, cut from the world, and totally disconnected from her own emotional world as well. And because she does not understand her own feeling, she has no empathy for other people at times as well. She torments her students and Klemmer, a man who happens to step into her life. Since her relationship with her mother is based on love and hate at the same time, she is used to being tortured by someone she loves. And she projects this pattern of relationship into her connection with Klemmer. She has an anomalous and confused understanding of a relationship. She expects to be hurt on one hand, and on the other hand she is terrified of being hurt. And so this confusion of hers develops into a tragedy. It does, because Klemmer is an ordinary guy with normal perception of the world. Just like a normal society responds to anomaly, so does he, with disgust. He's hurt himself and to restore his inner balance, he revolts and ends up acting violently himself. I love this book, because not many creators manage to delve deep into a psychology of anomalous behavior so well. Jelinek makes her life personal. Society often mistreats abnormal people, responding to them with mistrust and repulsion. That happens because we do not understand them. This book is a chance to see up close what it is like to live a life of a deviant. Now we're in her shoes.

The new kind of Europe

Though it has been almost twenty years since this book was firstly published, you can hardly see its ages. Now, you may name lots of other books that did (or still do) the same, but every single one of them stood as a giant monolith versus rest of the literature. There is certain ammount of dark majesty in this book. Somehow, when one travels, one only gets to see those polished places made especially for toursit, those plastic feelings without passions that we grew accustomed to, and when someone smashes you with exactly that, passion, you must fall in wonder, or be forever silent and stunned. When it first camed out, it was received badly, by fellow artists and not-so-fellow critics. But waht is to expect from the work that spits into the center of the "old grandeur" of Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Dark Prater, place of whores and their customers, where cries of rage and lovemaking are silenced with slaps and knife cuts, so different from the shiny Prater by daylight, built and made for tourist which cannot see farther than spinning wheel. It is no surprise that darkness of Wienna portraied here made some people uneasy. Somehow, it is by far more easier to awert ones eyes and refuse to see anything, than face the challenge, risking sanity. Book that should be read, and studied....

Congratulations for the Nobel prize!

If you are conservative, I do not recommend the book, otherwise very much. Yes, it contains some phornographic details. And? The book helps very much to understand people you meet every day. Erika, the piano teacher, has an extremely problematic relation to her mother. Some examples: Although Erika is not a joung woman, the mother expects her to be at home in time, they sleep in a same bed -Erika grows up without a father, etc. I have never seen a better description of such a situation. You get a very good insight of the motivations behind the everyday acts and the developement of Erika's voyeurism. Erika, then, finds herself in a love relation with her young student. She can in this affaire live out her sexual phantasies, but none of them is prepared for the things comming, the sadistic phantasies of her also break out, but somehow you feel sorry for her. It is difficult to summarize the many observations of the author. Read without preoccupations, it's worth to do! Congratulations for the Nobel prize!

A devastating meditation

You might not expect to find a novel that among other things links chamber music with the perils of perfectionism, sexual masochism and sadism - and the inner and outer life of a talented and tormented woman. "The Piano Teacher" does this and much more. Erika Kohut is a former music prodigy in her late thirties, a teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, strict and rigid with her students - as well as with herself. Her father left shortly after her birth and she lives with her elderly mother, who is, we are told, old enough to be her grandmother, and her "inquisitor and executioner all at once." Her mother has given her all to assuring her daughter's talent: "Erika has never had to do housework, because dustrags and cleansers ruin a pianist's hands." The daughter's "vocation is her avocation: the celestial power known as music." Erika has a room of her own in their apartment - mostly a place to hide some of her possessions. Mother and daughter sleep in one bed. Her mother expects obedience, loyalty - and Erika's paycheck, which is to help buy them a new apartment. Erika wants a life of her own but has no idea of how to go about getting it. She is repulsed by the fact of her aging and by her femaleness. Love and suffering are inextricably linked. She wanders through Vienna after work and lies to her mother in order to indulge herself occasionally in excursions to peep shows and furtive shopping trips to buy beautiful, well-made clothes which she takes home stuffed in her briefcase - so that Mom won't see. Erika's cacophonous memories of her past sexual episodes with men roil in her head. She is overwhelmed by herself. She cannot feel nor respond to conventional expressions of tenderness and love. She knows what she wants, however, and develops a relationship with a much younger student, Walter Klemmer, in order to get it. This is an amazing novel about an unconventional and unconventionally disturbed woman, the urge to direct one's own suffering, and the consequences of a life so thoroughly dedicated to control and perfection. The descriptions are compact and rich: not a word is wasted. It's a political novel, too: critical of modern bourgeois life. I was mesmerized and disturbed by it, and awed by Jelinek's abilities.

Beyond Words

Being German, I read the German version. If the translation is any good, I can only recommend the novel. Not as a Christmas present for your boy-/girl-friend, though - it might spoil the evening.Jelinek's novel is about violence. And everything about the novel is violent - the things she describes, the characters, the society they live in, and most of all the language. If you don't discredit it right away as outright obscenity, you'll be surprised, what Jelinek does with language (or rather: to language).I wouldn't say that the book is a must for everyone. But if you are in the mood for something brutally true and don't get shocked or depressed easily, go right ahead ...!