Greed - Softcover

Jelinek, Elfriede

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1846686660 ISBN 13: 9781846686665

Publisher: Serpent's Tail, 2008

Synopsis

Kurt Janisch is an ambitious, but frustrated country policeman. Things are not going right in his life - at least not fast enough. But a country policeman gets talking to a lot of people in the line of duty - particularly women. Lonely, middle-aged women, women with a bit of property perhaps... Matters go from bad to worse: for Kurt Janisch, for the women who fall for him. Someone sees too much, knows too much. Soon there's a body in a lake and a murderer to be caught. 

A thriller set amid the mountains and small towns of southern Austria, Greed is Elfriede Jelinek's most accessible novel since The Piano Teacher. But as always Jelinek gives the reader a lot more to think about: the ecological costs of affluence, the inescapable burden and inadequacy of our everyday words, the exploitative nature of relations between men and women, the impossibility of life without relationships. A meditative reflection on ageing, Greed is another chapter in Jelinek?s chronicling of her love/hate relationship with Austria.

About this title

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 Boell 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.

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
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1846686660
• ISBN 13: 9781846686665
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 354