the piano teacher (elfriede jelinek, tr. joachim neugroschel)

I finished the Piano Teacher, yesterday, Christmas day. As anyone who has read the book can testify, it’s a gruelling read. One that gathers pace as the book unfolds, measured out in long scenes of increasing psychological and physical horror, told in a distanced, ironic tone which one suspects never quite translates, no matter how effective Joachim Neugroschel’s English version. The memory of Haneke’s film and Huppert lingers in the back of the mind throughout. In a book where the issue of physicality is so potent, the image of Huppert’s austere, skinny attractiveness perhaps works against the depiction of Erika in the novel. Huppert is on the cover, she’s become the Piano Teacher. But the piano teacher existed before Huppert claimed her. 

The brutality of the novel generates a classic horror reaction. The more we are shocked, the more we want to read on. The first half of the novel is more mundane. Erika Kohut observes, she lives on the edge of the world. We share her observations, her consciousness. It’s only as she starts to engage with the sub-Nazi youth, Walter Klemmer, that things move from the conceptual to the actual. Contemplated inflicted pain is not the same as actual inflicted pain. Contemplated rejection is not the same as actual rejection. The novel explores the gap between the workings of the mind and the workings of the world; something that is all the more pertinent in a time where the conceptual warriors are given a platform in the  virtual world to wage their conceptual battles or indulge their conceptual perversions. 

Yet, beyond the terror the book inspires, why is this novel so compelling? It contains the perversity of Maldoror. The cruelty of Bataille. Many might question its morbid fascination with the dark side. Whilst the novel depicts the abuse of a woman in harrowing detail, it’s hard to view it as a feminist tract, when Erika’s mother is also her psychological oppressor. What perhaps marks the novel out is the courage with which it converts Erika into a tragic heroine not of someone else’s abuse narrative, but her own transgression. Erika, who is more than capable of committing a cruel action herself, is hoisted on her own petard. She inhabits a world whose atomisation, to use a phrase, means that her mind, brilliant as it is, turns and twists inwards, in the process catching her in a trap of its own making. The relentless way in which the author traces this process seems to articulate a literary courage on her part. Jelinek is prepared to reveal those things we would rather not acknowledge exist. The terrible contradictions of the human heart. Society is constructed on a basis of these elemental yearnings, which acquire shape in fantasies which have veered so far off beam that when they come to be realised, they destroy the subject entirely. The reason for the Piano Teacher’s power as a novel is that it mercilessly tears back the veil and shows the Western world in all its hideous deformity. Where we think we perceive beauty, there actually hides savagery. Behind the pretty child in the advertising poster, there lurks a grinning skull.