In Absence of A Lit Class...

So last Sunday I finished reading The Piano Teacher. It’s an intense book, both in terms of the subject matter, and Elfriede Jelinek's skills as a writer, (not to mention Joachim Neugroschel‘s skills as a translator.)

Basically it’s the story of Erika Kohut, a piano teacher who was once destined to become a concert pianist. She’s 35, unmarried, and lives with her domineering (to say the least) mother in Vienna. She’s also a class-A pervert and nut-job, to put it bluntly. The combination of her classical music studies, and her childhood upbringing has created a character that is severely emotionally and socially underdeveloped. The author examines the consequences of this upbringing by introducing a young male piano student into the mix, and rolls out the details on the complete disaster that happens when he attempts to start a sexual relationship with her.

All of the plot points and character developments are basically just a backdrop for Jelinek to ruminate upon psychology, in terms of feminism, theories of the self, the dual/destructive nature of creativity, etc, and if you like that kind of thing, you will definitely like this book. It’s been a long time since I have read anything this dense, so I really enjoyed it, even if I had to do a lot of background reading to fully understand it.

Of course, if you are looking to get your rocks off, you might want to look elsewhere. This quote puts it best:

What is so powerful about The Piano Teacher is that these scenes do not serve to titillate or needle our prudishness; instead, they reveal a state of mind so used to subjugation that it yearns to make the abuse (of Erika) real, manifest.

People haven’t written much about the book (or at least, it’s not readily available online) but film reviews from Village Voice, and the Bright Lights Film Journal were helpful.

Other readings I found helpful were:

Donald Kuspit’s piece on the relationship between art and perversion.

This movie review, in particular since it’s the only thing that I could find that discusses the development of the Erika Kohut character as reflection of the work produced by the Vienna psychologist Heinz Kohut.

Bios of Elfriede Jelinek here, and here.


[BTW, read the Bambiland piece on her web page – unrelated, but it’s pretty incredible: On the left menu, look for Bambiland (English) under the Theatertexte heading.]

Now I get to see the movie...