Lust

by Elfriede Jelinek

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 student who rescues her after a day of vigorous use by her husband. But Michael is on his way up the Austrian political ladder, and he is, after all, a man.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781852421830
Publisher:	Serpent's Tail Publishing Ltd
Publication date:	03/15/1992
Series:	Masks
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.50(d)

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 by Michael Haneke of The Piano Teacher won the three main prizes at Cannes in 2001. In 2004, Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Editorial Reviews

Sport, capitalism, male penetrative sexuality, bourgeois consumerism, the family - are pilloried in between the ceaseless rapes, buggeries and other adventures. Extraordinarily well-written, with many brilliant turns of phrase, this remains in my mind as the most disturbing European novel I have read this year,A thorough rubbishing of romantic love, Lust is intricately written with a tumbling pace, sustained and effective word-play and plenty of sharp, cynical authorial observation. More than good.,The literary equivalent of Cindy Sherman's photographs of oozing, dislocated sex organs or a particularly corrosive lyric by PJ Harvey... as seamy and utterly honest as Martin Amis's Money

From the Publisher

An unrelenting look at the blank correspondences between marriage, capitalism, and sex.

Voice Literary Supplement

The acclaimed author of The Piano Teacher again reveals the grotesque corruption of post-WW II Austrian society. The setting is an Alpine ski resort, built on the profits generated by tourism and a polluting paper plant. The director of the plant is a swaggering vulgarian who divides his time between oppressing his workers and having sex with his wife. Like virtually all the book's characters, he is driven by his insatiable lust. His wife, Gerti, is gradually breaking down under this constant sexual attention, drinking heavily, until one day she wanders out of the house in a dressing gown and slippers. She is ``rescued'' by Michael, an ambitious young man with designs on a political career, who is no less of a sexual predator than her husband. Jelinek tells this story in a compulsively punning, often witty prose (skillfully translated by Hulse), but the book is disfigured by repetitiveness and the author's undisguised contempt for her characters. Marriage is depicted as little more than legalized prostitution, women are trapped and pummeled but unworthy of sympathy, children are greedy little narcissists, everyone is corrupt, venal and stupid. The town is little more than a parody of Marx's description of capitalism as the war of each against all. Ultimately, for all the considerable skill with which Lust is crafted, it is shrill and deadening. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly