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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | ELFRIEDE JELINEK: Writing Woman, Nation, and Identity: A Critical Anthology
ISBN# 9780838641545
Reviewed by: R. C. Conard, University of Dayton
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When Austrian Elfriede Jelinek (b. 1946) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004, the literary world was shocked. Outside the German-speaking world she was almost unheard of, and within it she was considered an eccentric, an elitist, an enfant terrible, a crank who had little good to say about anyone and certainly not about the Austrian society in which she lived. Her esoteric work was deemed incomprehensible to all but erudite readers familiar with feminist theory, philosophy, sociology, pop culture, Austrian history, politics, and music. Though these 12 well-informed essays - all committed to explaining Jelinek as a world-class writer - unintentionally (perhaps unavoidably) encourage this extreme view of Jelinek, they are exemplary in presenting this complex author to an English-speaking public unfamiliar with her abundant work. Jelinek's radical literary experiments make capturing her work in translation difficult. Only her novel The Piano Teacher (Eng tr., 1988) is well known, but it is atypical of Jelinek's writing because it is easy to read. Because her recognition among Anglophones is likely to lag for some time, this volume is particularly welcome. The contributors, all known Jelinek scholars, penetrate her postmodern density and analyze the depth of her critical confrontation with a post-Holocaust world. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty, and literary critics.
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