The Piano Teacher
Elfriede JelinekIn The Piano Teacher, Elfride Jelinek creates a shocking portrait of a talented, capable woman fashioned by society into a ticking bomb. Set in 1980s Vienna, it describes a culture rotting under the weight of its oppressive, outmoded ideals—a place mirrored by the heroine’s own repressed dreams. Erika Kohut, piano teacher at the prestigious Vienna Conservatory, is a quiet woman devoted to Bach, Beethoven, & her domineering mother. Her life consists of desperate boredom, neurotic possessiveness, & hopeless dreams of a concert career whose hour has long passed.
Enter Walter Klemmer—a handsome, arrogant man out to conquer Erika’s affections. Suddenly the dangerous passions roiling under her subdued exterior explode in a release of sexual perversity & long-buried violence. Awarded the Nobel & the Heinrich Boll Prize for her outstanding contribution to German letters, Elfriede Jelinek is one of the most original & controversial writers in Austria today. The Piano Teacher was made into an acclaimed film by Michael Haneke in 2001.
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Elfriede Jelinek, who was born in 1946 & grew up in Vienna, now lives in Vienna & Munich. She has received numerous awards for her literary works, which include not only novels but also plays, poetry, essays, translations, radio plays, screenplays & opera librettos. Her awards include the Georg Büchner Prize & the Franz Kafka Prize for Literature. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 for her ‘musical flow of voices & counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés & their subjugating power’.