8 Austria - "The piano player" – Elfriede Jelinek, February 2014 (Score 1.57)

Erika’s mother is a monster, a self-centred control freak. She treats Erika Kohut, in her late 30s, as a five year old child. She sits up till all hours at night waiting for Erika to come home.

They invariably have a dreadful row, followed by a reconciliation. There is only one bed in their home so they even sleep together with no apparent sexual connotations.

We read Erika’s thoughts during a journey on a trolley-bus, in an extended stream of consciousness. I feel that her mother may be driving her towards madness. When younger, she self-mutilated by cutting the back of her hand, and continued this throughout her life in ways which are graphically described, but are too horrible for me to repeat here. She is deranged, this conjecture being supported by her behaviour when visiting, not for the first time, a sordid peep show.

Herr Kohut was taken to a kind of care-home years before, possibly suffering from dementia. The owners are clear about their purpose in life, having converted their big country house for two purposes, one being to bring in as much income as possible, the other being to provide somewhere for people to dispose of their troublesome relatives. Making money is by far the most important in their eyes.

Erika is a piano teacher, having failed in her mother’s desire to make her a successful concert pianist. She earns a living from teaching pupils sent to her for “improvement”, most having little or no interest in music. Walter Klemmer is an atypical student. He has some skill, but he is much more interested in his ulterior motives with regard to Erika.

Much of the story revolves round the interaction between Erika Kohut and Walter Klemmer. I won’t describe this, but it is clear to me that Erika is seriously disturbed, and that Walter is in the way there. His behaviour towards Erika is, ultimately, brutal and totally unacceptable in any age or time.

This shocking story does not chime with the, at least initially, beautifully descriptive writing. For example, on page 12 we read “Its (Vienna’s) buttons are bursting from the fat white paunch of culture”. A person who thinks this does not like Vienna, nor perhaps even culture. On the other hand, on page 138 we read, as Erika leaves an amusement arcade in the Prater, “The lights grope towards her, find nothing to hold on to, run their fidgety fingers over her kerchief, slide off, draw a regretful trail of colour down her coat, and then fall on the ground behind her, to die in the dirt”. This is so descriptive.

The translation from German is into American English and, while I have no real fault with this, one or two places in the text grated so badly because of their sudden total lack of fit into the sober flow of the language.

For example, on page 13 we have “She’s still got her Mom, she don’t need no Tom”. We understand what it means, and the translator may have thought it necessary to achieve the rhyme effect of the original (Mütterlein versus frei’n). The original German is “Sie hat noch ein Mütterlein und braucht daher keinen Mann zu frei’n”. In line with the style of the language I would have read this as something like “She still has her dear mother, and so doesn’t need a husband to set her free”.

On page 124 Walter Klemmer’s mother and father own a “mom-and-pop store”, and Walter will have to return to that if he fails his exams again. An internet search revealed that is an American expression for a small business, typically owned and run by members of a family. The German reads “Er kommt aus einer kleinbürgerlichen Greisslerfamilie und wird dorthinauch wieder zurück müssen”. This translates as “He comes from a petit bourgeois grocer family, and so will have to go back there”. The American version isn’t too exact here, and again doesn’t meet the style of the surrounding English.

Or am I just being a pedant?

I’m afraid though that the book began to bore me and I speed read most of it from about page 200, I really couldn’t score it at more than 2.0, and wondered how the Nobel panel could have awarded Jelinek a Nobel laureate. I had the same problem when we read Herta Muller. Could it be that in the case of both authors we happened to select and read their only turkeys?