From Publishers Weekly
Sexuality and violence are coupled in this brilliant, uncompromising book set in modern-day Vienna, by the winner of the 1986 Heinrich Boll Prize. Erika Kohut, a spinster in her mid-30s, has been selected by her domineering mother to be sacrificed on the altar of art. Carefully groomed and trained, she's unfortunately not gifted enough to become a concert pianist. Instead, she teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory. She still lives at home, and in the eyes of the world is the dutiful daughter. But there's another, perversely sexual side of Erika that she finds difficult to repress. She goes to a peep show, frequents the local park where Turks and Serbo-Croats pick up women and, just for kicks, slices herself with a razor. When one of her students, Walter Klemmer, falls in love with her, Erika demands sadomasochistic rituals before she'll agree to sleep with him. While the subject matter is deliberately perverse, Jelinek gets behind the cream-puff prettiness of Vienna; this novel is not for the weak of heart. Violence is a cleansing force, a point that brings back uncomfortable overtones of an Austria 50 years ago. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Teaching piano daily at the Vienna Conservatory is all that remains of Erika Knout's once promising career. Lately, however, her love for her star student, Walter Klemmer, is disrupting both her well-ordered professional life and her emotionally rigorous world at home with Mother. This neurotic love triangle, in which violence is confused with love, evolves toward inevitable breakdown as Erika finally defies Mother and, through Klemmer, excites chaotic passions. With her facility for metaphor and stylish narrative, Austrian Jelinek bears comparison to Schmidt and Boll at their best. Hers is a powerful debut in English; with five other novels awaiting translation, she should develop a large audience among serious readers. Paul E. Hutchison, Pennsylvania State Univ., University ParkCopyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Review
'A dazzling performance that will make the blood run cold' Walter Abish _A brilliant, deadly book_ Elizabeth Young _A brilliant, bitter, wonderful portrait of mother and daughter, artist and lover_ John Hawkes


Review
'A dazzling performance that will make the blood run cold' Walter Abish ‘A brilliant, deadly book’ Elizabeth Young ‘A brilliant, bitter, wonderful portrait of mother and daughter, artist and lover’ John Hawkes


Book Description
"The Piano Teacher is an exploration of fascism, not so much in the political sense as in the personal. In Joachim Neugroschel_s excellent translation, the language is simple yet full of imaginative, often funny metaphors, the view of the world original, if at times almost painfully bizarre."_New York Times Book Review"A dazzling performance that will make the blood run cold."_Walter Abish"A brilliant, bitter, wonderful portrait of mother and daughter, artist and lover."_John Hawkes"A brilliant, uncompromising book."_Publishers WeeklyErika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory by day. But by night she trawls the porn shows of Vienna while her mother, whom she loves and hates in equal measure, waits up for her.Into this emotional pressure-cooker bounds music student and ladies_ man, Walter Klemmer. With Walter as her student, Erika spirals out of control, consumed by the ecstasy of self-destruction.First published in 1983, The Piano Teacher is the masterpiece of Elfriede Jelinek, Austria_s most famous writer. Now a feature film directed by Michael Haneke, The Piano Teacher won three major prizes at the Cannes 2001 Festival including best actor for Benoit Magimel and best actress for Isabelle Huppert.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 Boll Prize for her contribution to German-language literature.


Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In awarding her the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, The Swedish Academy praised Elfriede Jelinek "for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power." In her most well known novel, The Piano Teacher, Jelinek creates a shocking, angry, aching portrait of a society stubbornly fabricating its own obsolescence, and of a young woman whom this society has slowly fashioned into a ticking bomb.

Erika Kohut, piano teacher at the very prestigious, very stuffy Vienna Conservatory, is a quiet woman in her mid thirties devoted to Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, and her domineering mother. The two women's life together is a seamless tissue of desperate boredom, fueled by television movies, neurotic possessiveness, and hopeless dreams of a concert career whose hour has long since passed. Enter Walter Klemmer-handsome, arrogant, athletic, out to conquer the secret of art and Erika's affections with all the rancid bravado of youth-and suddenly the dark and dangerous passions roiling under the piano teacher's subdued exterior explode in a release of sexual perversity and long-buried violence.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

A brilliant and uncompromising tale of sexuality and violence set in modern Vienna; Jelinek's Wonderful, Wonderful Times was selected as one of PW 's best 1990 paperbacks. (Feb.)

Library Journal