posted on 20 Feb 2023

The Piano Teacher by Elfrieda Jelenek

When Austrian author, Elfrieda Jelinek - now in her 70s - was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2004, it was seen as one of the more controversial decisions the committee had made. There’s no doubt that she is ‘difficult’ in many ways but that’s a tag that comes from her refusal to compromise on the issues that count. She’s a fighter of Fascism and the New Right and an unstinting analyst of the excesses of the patriarchy - qualities that will always make her enemies within and without the establishment. And, her books are not an easy read because they operate on multiple levels and don’t shy away from difficult or even downright unpleasant subjects.

Perhaps her best known novel in English is her 1983 novel The Piano Teacher that explores the destructive nature of control, repressed desires and violence. It’s the story of Erika Kohl who, having never quite made it as the great concert pianist that she and her mother had hoped would be her fate, she’s now earning her living as a piano tutor. But Erika and her mother are locked together in a dreadful co-dependancy. The two share a bed and her mother controls almost all aspects of her daughter’s life: what gets spent on clothes, when she can leave the house and whether she is allowed to even fraternise with any men.

Her mother’s stifling control forces Erika to find ways of rebelling - initially minor acts of dissent slowly escalate until her sensual side bursts out in the pursuit of secret acts of pornographic voyeurism. Her sexuality is expressed though relatively minor acts of transgression and sadomasochistic desires that she engages in secretly.

Soon Erika is transferring these repressed desires into an infatuation with one her students, Walter Klemmer who seems to be showing her plenty of attention. But Klemmer, who is not especially talented at the piano, is in fact very well practiced as a minor gigolo  and Erika (mistakenly as it turns out) believes he offers the possibility of turning fantasy into reality but she is forced to confront the reality of the actual pain she unleashes.

As I have suggested already, Jelinek doesn’t really deal in easy reads and The Piano Teacher is full of Erika (and the author’s) sense of disgust and self-hate. It’s a book that looks at the essentially destructive nature of control and offers no satisfying balms. Erika, it’s no real spoiler to reveal, does not find her way to freedom through her perversity.

Although there are some parallels to be found between the author and her central character, this is emphatically not some kind of autobiographical revelation. It’s a twisted political fable - the politics of gender and family - that happens to be informed by Jelinek’s own experiences. Ultimately though, it’s the writing that whets the edge of the novel and this is well captured by Hermione Holy in her review of the book for The Guardian in 2010:

‘The writing, like the psychic states it depicts, is disturbing, uncomfortable and terrifyingly powerful. Shards of it stick in your mind..’ 

A hardback will cost you over £20 but there are cheaper paperbacks available and the book is still in print from Serpent’s Tail publishing.

 

Terry Potter

February 2023