The Piano Teacher - Paperback

by Elfriede Jelinek (Author), Joachim Neugroschel (Translator)

From the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian author: a "brilliant, uncompromising" novel that "gets behind the cream-puff prettiness of Vienna" (Publishers Weekly).

In 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, and her domineering mother. Her life consists of desperate boredom, neurotic possessiveness, and 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 and long-buried violence.

Awarded the Nobel and the Heinrich Boll Prize for her outstanding contribution to German letters, Elfriede Jelinek is one of the most original and controversial writers in Austria today.

The Piano Teacher was made into an acclaimed film by Michael Haneke in 2001.

Author Biography

Elfriede Jelinek was born in Mürzzuschlag, Austria, in 1946, and grew up in Vienna, where she attended the Vienna Conservatory of Music. She is the author of five other novels, a collection of poetry, a number of pieces for radio and theater, and is the German translator of Thomas Pynchon, as well as a composer and organist. Ms. Jelinek lives in Vienna and Munich. In 1986 she was awarded the prestigious Heinrich Böll Prize. Most recently she has published Der Tod und das Mädchen I-V (2003), her "princess dramas." Elfriede Jelinek won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature.