Comment on the translation - Rated 
The original is written in a whimsical and delicate style, which compensates for the pornographic elements in the later chapters. It is very difficult to translate well. However this English translation is extraordinarily poor, with many mistakes and little sign of attempts to choose the best phrase. If you can manage the original, leave this translation alone.
Disturbingly fascinating - Rated 
Something written on the cover describes this book very well: "love, fear, and self-destruction". We follow a late 30-ish woman, Erika, in Vienna. She's a piano teacher ruthlessly controlled by her mother with whom she still lives. Into her life comes a young man, a student of the fine arts she teaches. Perhaps one cannot say he upsets her life, but through this man's encounter with Erika we get to discover some truly unsettling truths about this woman's psyche, relating to sexual identity more than anything. The relationship between Erika and her dominant mother is also an intricate part of the story. More than anything the language of Jelinek is truly wonderful, like an intricate melody. Might sound like something I am saying to appear clever, but it's not. She knows her alliterations very well and use them freely. A couple of times perhaps a bit too obviously, but most often not. The writings flows from one persons perspective into anothers without pause, line break, or anything to help you, like shadows of the characters melting into each other. Still it was not hard to follow the perspective. A few times I thought she said something only to make a comment or sound clever, that felt a bit besides the point of the story. But maybe I am being too critical. The language is still what I take with me after reading this book. It was truly amazing (even after translation), and I am definitely going to have to read more books by this author! People with little patience beware, Jelinek can take a couple of pages to get to the climax. More than once she falls into the habit of describing the situation by looking closer at who this person is and why it is doing what it is. I wouldn't say this disturbed me, as I was amazed with the way she writes, but I really felt that I was being held away from know what's going to happen. I guess that was the point, and she managed very well to work up the suspence this way.
Pulp fiction at its dubious best - Rated
Imagine a young man lusting after his piano teacher, an older female professor of music at a famous university who lives with her domineering mother. He pursues; she resists; he persists; she presents a list of kinky demands that, coupled with a bout of merciless sexual teasing, cause him to plan and then to execute an escape. First, however, he feels compelled to punish her physically for not yielding immediately to his importunate demands, and so he beats her to the point of breaking her nose and even a rib. In a puritanical society such as ours that considers the baring of an actress' breast on television sufficiently obscene to warrant a hefty fine from governmental regulators, a careful reader of this catalogue of conventional perversions, fetishes, and cruelties may be tempted to discard it as pornography until he recalls that it has just been awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature. Puzzled, seeking some redemptive merit, such a reader may find it in the work's painstaking character development, in its rich store of anecdotes about classical composers, and in its lavish use of metaphors, elegantly translated from German by a skilled bilinguist whose own surname rendered in English is Newpenny. As the distinguished eighteenth-century lexicographer, Dr. Samuel Johnson, once wrote of a contemporary novelist's works, if you were to read Richardson [read Jelinek] for plot, you'd hang yourself. Ultimately, the reader is left to wonder about the judgment and mental acuity of those who surprisingly elevated this work from well-deserved obscurity twenty-one years after it was first published in German.
A portrait of Vienna - Rated 
This is the film tie-in edition of Jelinek's 1983 novel; Michael Hanke's adaptation has roused much controversy. The story focuses on a piano teacher, Erika- who lives with her aging mother in Vienna. Her time, when not teaching is spent in a variety of masochistic manners: self-mutilation,in the seedy lowlife of porn (where the whores hustle & the hustlers whore)and finally succumbing to a 'Mrs Robinson'-style relationship with a besotted (?) pupil, Walter. The novel gives more reason WHY Erika behaves as she does than Haneke's film. Vienna is more richly evoked and Walter is a far more impotent character than his on-screen counterpart (until his final 'game' with Erika). I admired the film, though felt it was exploitative (of the viewer). The book made me comprehend the cinematic adaptation- the flashbacks to Erika's formative sexual (non)experiences aided the character portrait. The only flaw is that of translation- the repetition of certain phrases ("She would stew in her juices", for example)sound either cliched or dumb (sometimes both) in English. Despite that, this is an interesting novel about the formation and destruction of a female in 1980's Vienna.
dissapointing culture - Rated
In Vienna, Austria, there's Erika Kohut, a woman over 40 years old that is an excellent piano teacher at the conservatoire. So at the heart of Europe it's supossed that these very refined task has to produce also very polite people.
But not good people. Music is only her work and the life of Erika is a poor one, because she still lives with an absorbent, castrating mother. So Erika hasn't no normal affective or sexual life and she resorts to the dark sides of human being to fill such an existence. She has finished in developing a taste for sex- shops, pornography and masochism. Erika knows an advanced student of piano much younger than her but all she wants is to satisfy his distorted sexuality. I think this novel in the context of an old Europe is a good example about the contradictions of the human being and a society that theoretically has much advanced but is strongly undermined by the egocentrism and lack of broterhood between other defaults. Inmigration to Europe from Africa and Spanish- America show us all these everyday.
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