Greed

by Elfriede Jelinek

Overview

From the Nobel Prize-winning author ....

Greed is the story of Kurt Janisch, an ambitious but frustrated country policeman, and the lonely women he seduces. It is a thriller set amid the mountains and small towns of southern Austria, where the investigation of a dead girl’s body in a lake leads to the discovery of more than a single crime. In her signature style, Jelinek chronicles the exploitative nature of relations between men and women, and the cruelties of everyday life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781846686665
Publisher:	Profile Books Limited
Publication date:	11/14/2016
Pages:	354
Product dimensions:	5.06(w) x 7.81(h) x 0.74(d)

About the Author

The leading Austrian writer of her generation, ELFRIEDE JELINEK received the Heinrich Böll Prize for her contribution to German literature in 1986. The film by Michael Haneke of The Piano Teacher won the three main prizes at Cannes in 2001. In 2004, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She lives in Vienna. In awarding Jelinek the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy wrote that the "extraordinary linguistic zeal" of her writing reveals "the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power."

Editorial Reviews

The male drive for property acquisition and sexual conquest is the theme of this murky postmodernist novel from the Austrian writer, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature. Though narrative and character are secondary here, it does have a storyline of sorts, plus a protagonist: Kurt Janisch, a rogue cop in the Alpine foothills of southern Austria. The ladies swoon over Kurt, a youthful-looking grandfather. He has a wife, a son who's a telephone repairman, a devoutly religious daughter-in-law and a grandson. The opening suggests we will get to know this family, but they soon disappear from view, along with the anti-clerical gibes. We're left with Kurt and his customary targets: single women or widows who own houses. "Property is the only thing that counts . . . a house keeps its value. A body decays." Yet ironically, Kurt is up to his ears in debt, unable to get the houses he craves. Perhaps he is stymied by his "persistent angry darkness." Not surprisingly, he likes rough sex, which leads him to strangle Gabi, who's not quite 16, and dump her body in the lake. The storyline, which comes and goes, shows the discovery of the body and the subsequent fruitless investigation (20 detectives, 2,000 people questioned, bureaucracy at work); there will be no resolution, no denouement, just a suicide by another of Kurt's targets. Nor will Kurt's darkness be examined; he is little more than an erect penis seeking a true climax. (Like Jelinek's 1989 novel Lust, this associates sexual hunger with capitalistic greed.) What's left is an authorial voice that manages to be both whimsical and labored; this weakens the satirical barbs against societal forces that have made nature itself suspect,whether the man-made lake or the mountain hollowed out by a mine. Much less accessible than Jelinek's best-known work, The Piano Teacher (1983), this is an unrewarding trek across a depressing landscape.

Kirkus Reviews