The Piano Teacher: A Novel

THE PIANO TEACHER is so raw and brutal and honest that it seems almost deserving of five stars if for no other reason than by virtue of its intellectual bravery...on the other hand, it is so raw and brutal and honest that it can be difficult to internalize, difficult to experience. Measuring it with a scale that starts at 'I hate it' and ends with 'I love it' seems ridiculous--even the judgment of good or bad is insufficient. It seems to me that about all that can be said about a book like THE PIANO TEACHER is that it will be worthwhile to some readers.It is the story of Erika Kohut, an emotionally and developmentally stunted thirty-five-year-old woman, who early on showed promise of becoming a great concert pianist, but whose talent stopped just short of vaulting her into the ranks of celebrity. Much of Erika's failure to mature could be laid at the feet of her mother, perhaps; a woman with whom Erika still lives, and who dominated her daughter's upbringing. As a result, the two share a rather static love/hate relationship/cohabitation, and THE PIANO TEACHER is a chronicle of Erika's attempt to break free of that cage.Many books rely on a collaboration between author and reader for their impact; THE PIANO TEACHER, even more than others, seems dependent upon the reader's internal settings for resonance. The book's aggressive depiction of sexual situations and the degradation of the character of Erika will likely be off-putting for many and are, frankly, rather extreme--if that was all that there were to the book, then it would have little appeal. And the unusual omniscient technique that Ms. Jelinek uses to describe Erika's inner world may also be a stumbling block--I might say that it is all telling and little showing. Yet I felt that the author's technique--as well as the graphic sexuality--were well suited to depict the deconstruction of Erika; as both a woman, and as someone driven by inner forces to seek emotional fulfillment.It's as if one of the author's goals was to dismantle the popular conception of what a woman is--how she thinks, what she feels, and how she conceives of the world. In Ms. Jelinek's hands, that is often unflattering, and ugly as well. Yet disturbing as it is, that deconstruction is where I think the worth of THE PIANO TEACHER lies. I hesitate to call it insightful, as I doubt there are few women similar to Erica, but I do think it is illuminating. Others may disagree, and see Erica's case as too pathological from which to extract anything useful. I wouldn't argue, which is why I feel the worth of the book is highly dependent on the reader's internal settings. A difficult book to recommend, and even more difficult to know whom to recommend it to, yet no doubt powerful and intense.

it would be easy to approach this story as a surrealist’s glimpse at sexual repression and desire in vienna. jelinek shows she knows the freudian post-war viennese european novel and takes us much further.somewhere in this story is embedded a political metaphor for the reader who like political fiction, but i was more at home with jelinek’s hidden tradition of influences, the industrialization of sexual language by cleland in fanny hill, the unconventional prose styles of thomas bernhard and peter handke, and, i suspect, some chumminess with the works of sade and henry miller’s Opus Pistorum, as erika’s inner world of sexual fantasy, as blocked sexual experience, is manifested by her in the world outside her head.in the first half of erika’s two-part story, the path to becoming a concert performer is blocked when erika failed to rank high in an important competition. her over protective mother who prepared her for success from an early age, adjusts to ‘their’ loss and continues being her daughter’s guide, protector, and overbearing mother as erika ages into a middle-aged woman as a piano teacher still living at home under her mother’s heavy thumb.erika is content with the way her life is lived, until into her piano class, in the second half of the novel, enters a student, ten years her junior, who pursues her as a lover. with the second half, the writing style changes, as the story becomes a study of gender roles within sexuality stripped of inhibitions down to primeval behavior.a disturbing story, but well told.

By upbringing, and perhaps, by nature, Erika's existence is one of utter control and discipline. Her tyrannical mother requires her to sublimate her passions in order to achieve greatness as a pianist, a goal that is, it would seem, out of her reach. The enormity of her external constraint is matched by the wildness of her inner life. Enter a handsome young music student who is eager to advance their liaison beyond its professional limits, and you have a story. How you react to this novel may turn on your appreciation of the stream of consciousness aspect of it. Erika's inner life is minutely captures with all of its discontinuities. Shifts in time and place occur abruptly and in way that confused me, at times. However, I was so spellbound by Jelinek's florid prose and psychological accuracy that coherence receded in importance--or, perhaps I found a coherence of a different sort.

All the main characters in this book are mentally unbalanced in extremely unpleasant ways -- the desperately repressed piano teacher-- her monster of a controlling mother with whom she lives (and even shares a bed) and the handsome music student who falls in love with her but then attacks her physically, mentally and sexually and sends her completely over the edge into utter madness. The extreme-ness of these characters seemed to me improbable --- both individually and in their toxic interactions, but I kept reading this long, basically well-written book (skipping pages after three-quarters of the way through) because I could not believe that there would not be some redeeming resolution at the end. There was none..... and the end even more depressing than the beginning. I felt utterly empty at the end.

A deep, dark well of Marquis de Sadism, that thrashes about in the mental undergrowth and lurks around in the bushes of moral philosophy. This repetitive and tedious book (which would have sufficed as a short story) appears to be a critique and attack on the (ahem) ligatures of old fashioned classical music pedagogy and the stuffy teaching of the old masterworks. I found myself agreeing with two sentences only, which I underlined……”Don’t hold every note as long as the score tells you to, on the other hand not every note is marked the way it ought to sound” and “Schubert likes to express orchestral effects on the keyboard….one must be able to recognise and play these effects and the instruments they symbolise” But as for the rest….I just wasted an afternoon reading this (Nobel prize winning?) diatribe.

I had high expectations for this book, but found it so very dull and unengaging. With no sympathy or understanding of the characters, I laboured for 100 pages then gave up.

Elfriede Jelinek's - The Piano TeacherRating -4.5/5A glass cup falls down and breaks into a thousand small pieces, and then each broken piece is picked up and glued intricately with the other broken pieces to finally shape it into the cup it was broken off from. The Piano Teacher is so devastatingly hurt and torn that anyone who drinks from the cup bleeds as well. She's violent towards one, harmful towards another - a broken thing evoking pity among her readers...And that's the story. ..Humor-less, self- deceptive and bland - the story displays the pain inflicting edge of human resolute...The Piano Teacher shares her apartment and her bed with her authoritarian mother. This is where the writer- Elfriede Jelinek, steps on the gas. Her thoughts are transmitted through a tube of poetry, and she is cruel and one might say, as disturbed and seemingly privy to the subjugation of her subject - Erika Kohut, The Piano Teacher.Erika's student, Klemmer, falls in love with her in the way one would fall for a class/subject in school. But, he is also torn and devasted when he gets a certain letter from this teacher...It's the broken cup of a story the reader must drink from again, and it makes the reader bleed...The writing is sad, complaining and true. Elfriede hits the bull eye in this dark, sad tale of love, loss and indentity...To feel your emotions surge like mad waves, read this.............................................................

Let me start by saying that I haven't finished this novel. I got about halfway and had to put it aside. I did this thinking I could come back and pick up where I left off - but that turns out not to be so. This novel is so intense and so remarkable that I have to go right back to the start. That is not a bad thing. That could well be a mark of its vital worth.This novel is so completely unconventional that it creates psychological states in me that I have never experienced in all my years as an avid reader. I was hooked into it right from the start by the author's piercing depiction of the protagonist's relationship with her mother. I have to admit that I had a similar relationship with mine - the controlling mother, the daughter struggling to find herself as a separate being - and so it was riveting to see such a relationship rendered with penetrating truth in a novel. I've never seen that before.The novel is by turns gripping, shocking, obscure, boring - as if the author veers between drowning in the cauldron of her own subconscious and strutting on a burlesque stage. It's pornographic in the sense that it presents naked characters doing things that are generally done in private - from shame or custom or because there isn't anywhere else to do them. Of course I'm not talking about sex. This novel is a gruelling adventure. But perhaps it is best to undergo it as naked as the characters - which is what I'm getting at here. Most novels allow the reader to retain a level of clothedness, psychologically speaking. This novel demands that you strip off every protection, every defense.Thus, you reach places that render language and especially the solemn words vacant. I can't call this novel honest or truthful or anything like that. It requires a new language. it is a new language.

A strange book - having finished it I'm not sure if I enjoyed it or not. How the 'story' develops you can get from elsewhere. It has two parts merely to create a hiatus between parts 1 and 2. The first part is unremmittingly sado-masochistic but at the same time shows the struggle and care between a mother and a single daughter brought up to be the showpiece child and denied the exterior world of the everyday for the toil to perfection of music and the mother's striving to be a good bourgeois Viennese hausfrau. I admired and disliked the piano teacher at the same time in her wallowing self-pity and inescapable tight cage. The second part grows to the masochistic conclusion of the accelerating dance around voyeurism, more masochism and self-harm to the final punishment.This is all delivered in a terse prose style which appears to be full of allusion ( I cannot say anything of the translation not knowing any German) and open in the sense that it forces thought and conjecture into your mind and you question all the time - like a good book should. I found it quick to read but it has left me with much to think about and will need to be reread again.I'm still not sure about it but I would recommend it to anybody that wants a challenging read from a book that is completely out of the blue.