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Die Klavierspielerin
Elfriede Jelinek
publisher: Rowohlt, Berlin, 1983

translated as:
The Piano Teacher
publisher: Querido, Amsterdam, 1989
translation: Joachim Neugroschel

refered to by:
The Radetzky March
Joseph Roth

Atomised
Michel Houellebecq

A Heart of Stone
Renate Dorrestein


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summary:
Erika Kohut, a 40-year-old is a piano teacher who still lives with her mother. While her mother waits up for her, Erika trawls the seedy side of contemporary Vienna, visiting porn shows and peep shows. Her Jekyll and Hyde existence is disturbed by a handsome young piano student.


bookweb    
ON ELFRIEDE JELINEK'S BOOKSHELF

The Loser
Thomas Bernhard, 1983
The late Austrian novelist meditates on Glenn Gould, the Canadian virtuoso pianist, in this fictive memoir of an imaginary friendship between Gould and the narrator.

Cutting Timber
Thomas Bernhard, 1984
Thomas Bernhard's novel of life amid the art and theatre society of Vienna and London.

Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon, 1973
Set in the closing years of World War II, this is a story of labyrinthine interconnections involving a Nazi Lieutenant Weissmann (once V.'s lover in another Pynchon novel), disguised as Captain Blicero, and an American sleuth, Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, while V-2 rockets fall on London.

The Wiener Gruppe
,
The theories of the Wiener Gruppe (founded by Hans Carl Artmann), which revolved around an experimental brand of literature in which plot and dialogue were subordinate to sound and language structure.

The Birth of Tragedy
Friedrich Nietzsche, 1872
Philosopher's classic study declares that Greek tragedy achieved greatness through a fusion of elements of Apollonian restraint and control with Dionysian components of passion and the irrational.

Moses and Monotheism
Sigmund Freud, 1939
The last book by a psychiatrist with a flair for words, 'ein unerreichbarer Schriftsteller'.

Music by Schubert
,
The romantic but 'mysterious' work of Franz Schubert (1797-1828), to whom Jelinek devoted a lengthy essay in 1998.

Music by Mahler
,
The symphonies of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), 'rustic composer on uncertain ground'.

BOOKS BY ELFRIEDE JELINEK:

The Piano Teacher
1983
Erika Kohut, a 40-year-old is a piano teacher who still lives with her mother. While her mother waits up for her, Erika trawls the seedy side of contemporary Vienna, visiting porn shows and peep shows. Her Jekyll and Hyde existence is disturbed by a handsome young piano student.
WHAT TO READ AFTER THE PIANO TEACHER?

CERTIFIABLE
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath, 1963
Sylvia Plath's only novel is an account of a young woman's breakdown - her attempted suicide, hospitalization and recovery.

Malina
Ingeborg Bachmann, 1971
A writer traumatized by her father has relationships with two men (who may or may not even exist).

HELL TAKES SOME GETTING USED TO...
The Story of My Baldness
Marek van der Jagt, 2000
Viennese teenager Marek, a studious type prone to dour remarks, struggles under the burdens of an overbearing mother, a distant father, and a perilously small penis.

Dream Story
Arthur Schnitzler, 1926
Story of a sexual frustration, filmed by Stanley Kubrick as Eyes Wide Shut.

Journey to the End of the Night
Louis-Ferdinand Céline, 1932
The picaresque adventures of Bardamu move from the battlefields of World War I (complete with buffoonish officers and cowardly soldiers), to French West Africa, the United States, and back to France in a style of prose that's lyrical, hallucinatory, and hilariously scathing toward nearly everybody and everything. Yet, beneath it all one can detect a gentle core of idealism.

THE PIANO IN LITERATURE
The Pianoplayers
Anthony Burgess, 1986
Partly based on Burgess's childhood experiences - his father was a piano player in Manchester pubs.

The Secret
Anna Enquist, 1997
A man manages to trace an old love, a pianist whose life is marred by a secret.

Piano
Jean Echenoz, 2003
In this novel we journey with Max, a famous concert pianist, from the trials of his everyday life, through his untimely death, and on into the afterlife.

WHAT TO LISTEN TO WHILE READING?
Music by Bach
,
The Brandenburg Concertos (1720) by J.S. Bach, which are rehearsed, in Erika and Klemmer's presence, by the conservatory orchestra.

Music by Brahms
,
Brahms, the musician of the 'unsatisfied' - particularly the unsatisfied woman.

Music by Schubert, Schumann and Beethoven
,
Sonatas by Schubert, the Kreisleriana by Schumann, sonatas by Beethoven - all highpoints in the life of a piano studen.

[Die Kinder der Toten]
1995

Wonderful, Wonderful Times
1980

Lust
1989

[Gier: ein Unterhaltungsroman]
2000

Women as Lovers
1975

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editor-in-chief: Stacey Knecht, info@the-ledge.com
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