Customer Reviews

Greed: A Novel

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Yet another Nobel Prizewinner's book. Elfriede Jelinek's Greed is supposedly her most accessible work. At least, it says on the blurb. If this is accessible, I don't know what her other novels are like. It completely defeated me. Jelinek's prose is dense, long (paragraphs extending for pages), frequently unpunctuated; it roars in places, quivers with ferocious disdain for its characters (many of whom are unnamed). Nominally, this is about a country policeman who wants to amass property and so seduces every middle-aged landowning woman in his village; there is much furious and seedy coupling and complete lack of understanding between men and women; there is a murdered girl and her mother who is often terrified by her absence and at other times relieved. I could make neither head nor tail of this novel. Perhaps it is one to be grappled with, treated as an adversary? A reviewer in the Guardian, who has no patience with people demanding easy reads, called it daredevil, risk-taking prose ("What is killing the novel is people's growing dependence on feel-good fiction, fantasy and non-fiction. With this comes an inability or unwillingness to tolerate any irregularities of form, a prissy quibbling over capital letters, punctiliousness about punctuation. They act like we're still at school! Real writing is not about rules. It's about electrifying prose, it's about play.") But I made no headway. If any of you read it and understand it, please be sure to explain it all to me.

Please, someone inform me why I should slog through this. I read the description and it sounded great but I can't get past the writing style. I consider myself to be someone with a long history of reading critically but I am lost here. The run on sentences and lack of paragraphs are cumbersome. So far I can't tell what it's about, the ADD description in the earlier review seems apt in describing what the writing feels like. I really wanted to like this.

I read this book for my book club and boy was I disappointed. I don't know if it was the translation, or just the author, but this book is the worse book I've ever read. There is no character development or dialog. The sentences go on for miles without any complete thought. And just when you finish a chapter and you think you finally might understand what the heck is going on, the next chapter is about something completely different, like from an entirely different book. I would classify this style of writing as being in the mind of someone attention deficit meets narcotic addiction with a splash of Turrets. In other words, read this book if you really feel like bashing it, because that's all we did in our book club meeting :-\

Bitter acidic wit only partially neutralized by the breath of woman?
There is an innate failure of a cultural core as reflected in an individual struggle with reality. A stream of consciousness type of prose that seemd to cover a world of eventualities. When God leaves the church , the devil; finds a way.In the cool confident prose that breaks over you like a fresh cool ocean wave, we get the whiff of edelweiss and the just deserts of the country policeman. Oblique, cloudy and obtuse are the references to a God who lives in Catholic Churches, but not in the sins of the modern souls. So many philosophical reflections on the mechanistic economic structures that eat people and lead to greed.This Austria is not the Austria of the sound of music...
There is , here, a recognition of genius, of a tormented soul that writes very , very well.Accordian Crimes

Read GREED ...Jelinek is a rare and unusual author - and one of the all too few authors we can read in translation.

"A woman is permitted to chat or babble, but speaking in public with authority is still the greatest transgression." -Elfride Jelinek.

Elfriede Jelinek analyzes the male assessment and treatment of women with surgical lyricism. Her wisdom confronts the sordid reality that to most men women are to be used for their own pleasure, desires and...well--greed.
Reading Elfriede Jelinek's _Greed_ illuminates the public sphere's debasement of U.S. women who are politicians such as Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin or Cynthia McKinney. The 2008 U.S. presidential election and the misogynistic treatment of the women candidates-Hillary Clinton (D), Sarah Palin (R), and Cynthia McKinney (Gn) are illuminated by reading the writings of Nobel Prize winner, Elfriede Jelinek.

Gender-based attacks have been made against Palin, Clinton, and McKinney by men, by women, and especially by male clergy. These attacks have dominated discourse and drowned out discussion of the policies of the three women.

"At the time of the Nobel Prize, Jelinek was asked whether she thought feminism had made any significant gains over the years. "Nothing," she said, "would lead one to suppose that it had."

On October 27 2008 it was reported that Chad Michael Morisette depicted Sarah Palin hanging by a noose from the roof of a West Hollywood home and Sussex men blew up her effigy; a Chicago Catholic priest, Rev. Michael Pfleger, ridiculed Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, a human rights scholar called Clinton a monster; a professor, John L. Jackson Jr., writes in July `08 about Cynthia McKinney "From Racial Scapegoat to Political Spoiler."

Palin has been called a dominatrix. Clinton has been called a whore. McKinney has been called a slut and a hotheaded conspiracy theorist.

.."life and the world is most often viewed from a male perspective. "-Elfriede Jelinek: Provocation as the Breath of Life.

Elfriede Jelinek: Works in English

The Piano Teacher : a Novel / translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel. - New York : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988. - Translation of Die Klavierspielerin.

Wonderful, Wonderful Times : [novel] / translated by Michael Hulse. - London : Serpent's Tail, 1990. - Translation of Die Ausgesperrten.

Lust : [novel] / translated by Michael Hulse. - London : Serpent's Tail, 1992. - Translation of Lust.

Women as Lovers : [novel] / translated by Martin Chalmers. - London : Serpent's Tail, 1994. - Translation of Die Liebhaberinnen.

Einar / translated from German by P.J. Blumenthal. - Sausalito, Calif. : Post-Apollo Press, 2006. - Translation of Einar.

"Janisch [Greed] is a much darker figure than Woyzeck, even than Moosbrugger, and Jelinek a far more pessimistic thinker than either Büchner or Musil."- "Up from the Cellar," by Nicholas Spice _London Review of Rooks_ June 5, 2008.

After reading a positive review in the local newspaper, I purchased this novel and waded my way through it over several weeks. I hate to admit this but I found it extremely heavy to get thought. Some sections of prose very effective but the plot boarded on rambling for most of the time. This is not the first Nobel Prize winner I have found more pretension in their writing than accessible (Patrick White comes to mind) but I dont recommend this book for the faint hearted.