Author: Elfriede Jelinek
Title: The Piano Teacher (original German title: Die Klavierspielerin)
Year of publication: 1983
Page count: 322
Rating: ★★★
There’s a reason this Nobel laureate is considered one of Austria’s most controversial writers: Jelinek’s most famous novel is a divisive, shocking, visceral, psychosexual drama. Lately, I’ve been in the mood for novels centered around self-loathing female characters, but hoo boy—this brutally unflinching look inside the mind of Erika Kohut was a little like trying to scratch an itchy foot by stepping on shards of broken glass.
“It is a mother’s duty to help a child make up her mind and to prevent wrong decisions. By not encouraging injuries, a mother avoids having to close wounds later on. Erika’s mother prefers inflicting injuries herself, then supervising the therapy.”
Erika is “old” (mid-thirties), and teaches at the Vienna Conservatory after the concert pianist career her domineering and controlling mother had envisioned for her didn’t pan out—a partly autobiographical detail from Jelinek’s own upbringing. Mother and daughter still live together, even sharing a bed, in what can only be described as a profoundly dysfunctional and suffocating relationship, incestuous in all but deed. Erika is confined in every imaginable way, and it manifests in latent violence, self-harm, joyless sexual voyeurism, and degrading sadomasochistic desires; enter Walter Klemmer, a young, handsome, and self-absorbed student who sets out to seduce her. A ferocious mutual obsession soon develops, and The Piano Teacher turns into an uncomfortably close portrait of sexual repression spiraling out of control.
“Erika glides down into the warmth, the body-warm brook of shame, a bath in which one submerges cautiously because the water is rather dirty. Things well up, gush up. Filthy white-caps of shame, the dead rats of failure, scraps of paper, wooden scraps of ugliness, an old mattress caked with sperm stains. Things rise and rise. Higher and higher.”
In reality, the graphic sex is but a means to explore the parallels of power, control, humiliation and abuse that mark the relationships between mother and daughter, teacher and pupil, and man and woman. Walter is repulsed by Erika’s sadomasochistic fantasies, but he ultimately inflicts the violence she thought she wanted anyway… on his terms, without her consent, perfectly illustrating the difference between living out kinky desires and violent assault. All the crude, obscene details ironically stand at odds with Jelinek’s rather laconic writing style, but there is undeniable power in its detached coldness. The Piano Teacher is an unspeakably unpleasant yet unforgettable novel, faithfully and superbly adapted for the screen by fellow countryman Michael Haneke, starring an extraordinary Isabelle Huppert.
(Read in the original German)
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