Greed: A Novel - Hardcover

Jelinek, Elfriede

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1583227571 ISBN 13: 9781583227572

Publisher: Seven Stories Press, 2007

Synopsis

From the Nobel Prize-winning author ....

Greed is the story of Kurt Janisch, an ambitious but frustrated country policeman, and the lonely women he seduces. It is a thriller set amid the mountains and small towns of southern Austria, where the investigation of a dead girl’s body in a lake leads to the discovery of more than a single crime. In
her signature style, Jelinek chronicles the exploitative nature of relations between men and women, and the cruelties of everyday life.

About this title

About the Author:

The leading Austrian writer of her generation, ELFRIEDE JELINEK received the Heinrich Böll Prize for her contribution to German literature in 1986. The film by Michael Haneke of The Piano Teacher won the three main prizes at Cannes in 2001. In 2004, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She lives in Vienna. In awarding Jelinek the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy wrote that the "extraordinary linguistic zeal" of her writing reveals "the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power."

From Booklist:

One of Austria's most prominent and controversial writers, Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004; film aficionados will recognize her as the author of The Piano Teacher (1983; Eng. trans., 1988), which inspired Michael Haneke's darkly intense film of the same name. Here, Jelinek tells the story of a debt-ridden, small-town policeman who cynically seduces lonely women to separate them from their real estate, violating them emotionally and sexually in the process; when a teenage girl turns up dead, the policeman's scheme unravels, and the true depth of his all-encompassing, life-denying greed emerges. Sandblasting her characters with a relentless stream of linguistically sophisticated contempt, Jelinek again explores some of her perennial themes, including pervasive loneliness, the ubiquitous ugliness of sexual relationships, and the tragedy of environmental destruction. But she also steps outside of her narrative, implying that textual relationships may also be complicit in the web of exploitation. An original and provocative condemnation of much that other novelists deem sacred, it may also attract Pynchon and Barthelme fans looking for a new challenge. Brendan Driscoll
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About this edition

• Publisher: Seven Stories Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1583227571
• ISBN 13: 9781583227572
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336