About the Author

Elfriede Jelinek was born in Austria in 1946 and grew up in Vienna where she attended the famous Music Conservatory. The leading Austrian writer of her generation, she has been awarded the Heinrich B ll Prize for her contribution to German literature. The film by Michael Haneke of The Piano Teacher won the three main prizes at Cannes in 2001. In 2004, Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Reviews

A chilling and truthful vision of women's precarious position in a society still dominated by money and men
*Kirkus Reviews*

With formidable power, intelligence and skill she draws on the full arsenal of derision. Her dense writing is obsessive almost to the point of being unbearable. It hits you in the guts, yet is clinically precise
*Le Monde*

Jelinek's jaundiced view of love and marriage in the claustrophobic surroundings of rural Austria seem close to Karl Marx's view that marriage in bourgeois society is little more than legalised prostitution... Like Thomas Bernhard and the turn-of-the-century satirist Karl Kraus, Jelinek belongs to a long line of Austrian literary outsiders who, while relentlessly satirising the hypocrisy of their native bourgeois culture, have been clasped firmly to the establishment's bosom as cherished examples of Austria's enduring excellence in the arts.
*The European*

Demystifying the idea of love and romance, post-modernist/feminist author Jelinek brings to light some feminist interests in terms of work, love, marriage, perception of life, happiness, etc, through the contrasting stories of her two protagonists
*Library Journal*