Lust [Paperback]

Elfriede Jelinek (Author), Michael Hulse (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Masks | Publication Date: April 1, 1993

In a quaint Austrian ski resort, things are not quite what they seem. Hermann, the manager of a paper mill, has decided that sexual gratification begins at home. Which means Gerti - his wife and property. Gerti is not asked how she feels about the use Hermann puts her to. She is a receptacle into which Hermann pours his juices, nastily, briefly, brutally. The long-suffering and battered Gerti thinks she has found her saviour and love in Michael, a student who rescues her after a day of vigorous use by her husband. But Michael is on his way up the Austrian political ladder, and he is, after all, a man.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The acclaimed author of The Piano Teacher again reveals the grotesque corruption of post-WW II Austrian society. The setting is an Alpine ski resort, built on the profits generated by tourism and a polluting paper plant. The director of the plant is a swaggering vulgarian who divides his time between oppressing his workers and having sex with his wife. Like virtually all the book's characters, he is driven by his insatiable lust. His wife, Gerti, is gradually breaking down under this constant sexual attention, drinking heavily, until one day she wanders out of the house in a dressing gown and slippers. She is "rescued" by Michael, an ambitious young man with designs on a political career, who is no less of a sexual predator than her husband. Jelinek tells this story in a compulsively punning, often witty prose (skillfully translated by Hulse), but the book is disfigured by repetitiveness and the author's undisguised contempt for her characters. Marriage is depicted as little more than legalized prostitution, women are trapped and pummeled but unworthy of sympathy, children are greedy little narcissists, everyone is corrupt, venal and stupid. The town is little more than a parody of Marx's description of capitalism as the war of each against all. Ultimately, for all the considerable skill with which Lust is crafted, it is shrill and deadening.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail (April 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1852421835
• ISBN-13: 978-1852421830
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #691,687 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Lust, December 9, 2005

By 

Steve (By DUNDEE Scotland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lust (Paperback)

Elfriede Jelenik's Lust is a bleak, relentlessly dark novel- an explicit description of a woman's repeated sexual abuse by her husband, a rapacious businessman who regards his wife as a worn-out vessel for his bodily fluids. Home life is affluent but empty - their son is an overweening, irritating little brat (taking after his father). Later on, Gerti begins an affair with another man, whose contemptuous treatment of her simply echoes the sordid treatment of her husband. Finally, she takes her revenge on her husband- the only way she knows how.

This novel has a couple of stylistic oddities. Firstly, there are no characters in this novel. Rather, the work is populated by one-dimensional stooges. The wife, Gerti, is a speechless, passive vessel of exploitation, her husband a senseless brute driven by his bodily urges. If we gave Jelenik the benefit of the doubt, we may call them allegorical- although personally I find them shallow and didactic.

Secondly, there is no direct speech. This gives the book an oppressive atmosphere, which excludes the reader from any attempt to form his own opinion about the characters, as they are effectively dehumanised- robbed of their only means of articulation (and so Gerti's passive status is only further exacerbated). The effect is rather ruthless and authoritarian, as though Jelenik is forcing her own particular world view down the reader's throat, stripping the work of any potentially fruitful ambiguity. Further, there is a complete lack of humour in this novel. This is not a trivial criticism- Jelenik peppers her text with dark, witty asides here and there, but, despite being clever and well-written, they come across as simply bitter, empty cynicism.

When this book isn't recounting poor Gerti being poked and prodded in all sorts of demeaning ways, the author subjects the reader to a kind of vulgar-Marxist diatribe. Gerti's abuse, and her environmentally despoiled Alpine community are a microcosm of a bleak, empty world of alienation. However, it's all too relentless for my liking- the novel's insistent tone, what comes across as a kind of dreary feminist-Marxist tract, brow-beats the reader into submission. Its world view is too narrow, it lacks the breadth and richness of experience we expect from literature. One can't help but feel doubly disappointed in reading this book- firstly at the novel itself, but more profoundly, at the kind of mindset which could produce such a resigned, desolate world-view.

14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A universal Medea, May 7, 2006

By 

Luc REYNAERT (Beernem, Belgium) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lust (Paperback)

This relentless stream of brutal sexual gymnastics ('the penal colony of sex') circles around Man (no name), his sexual object (his wife), their child ('progenitorial profit') and the wife's would-be lover.
This principal menu is dressed with cheap anticapitalist rhetoric.

The logical conclusion of this book is the extinction of mankind, preponderantly for sexual reasons, and cardinally because of Man, 'that irreconciliable enemy of her sex', who considers his wife as a 'jar to p* in' and sex as 'emptying a dustbag'.
This book is a disgusting rage against mankind, heavy shooting with very serious collateral damage. Everything and everybody is yelled at: her dear fellow Austrians, her native village, Catholic Austria, the Pope ('the immortal souls of the unemployed whose number increaseth year by year as the Pope commandeth'), sports ('Silly Old Sally of an Olympian idea of humanity'), the prolets ('workers eating their wurst and waiting for the worst'), food ('poisonous cheese, rotten dairy products') with human digestion considered as a sewage system, even the seasons ('cut them down to dirty heaps as does winter the landscape').

However, the author contradicts herself fundamentally: there is Man, but 'no two human beings are alike'.
The ultimate result of this caricatural SM jeremiade is boring Grand Guignol: 'Nothing but those lights caresses the wretched bodies shamelessly confronting us in all their morning stench and exhaust fumes.'
No wonder that the author concludes: 'What people live on apart from their hope, is a mystery to me. Once the act of purchasing is accomplished, everything is really over.'
But for some, everything is not over: they read E. Jelinek, or better, listen to Mozart.

This book is only for those interested in a life view seen through extremely dark spectacles.

Five stars for the courage of the translator.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Relentlessly brutal, and not for the squeamish, April 23, 2008

By 

J. Miller "father, husband, teacher, writer, ... (Louisville, KY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lust (Paperback)

I don't know how anyone can call this book "feminist" since its author unloads a great deal of sneering pity and cold contempt upon its hapless female character Gerti. If anything, this book is a series of repetitive machine gun blasts of misanthropy aimed at modern Western civilization. It is certainly not a feminist analysis of the relationship between the sexes. Jelinek's writing is casual, filled with puns and wordplay, and deadpan. This book's accusatory tone and hostile, dissective attitude towards male-female relations reminds me of Marguerite Duras' The Malady of Death (although the latter is written in second person and this is in third person). Jelinek's ability to arouse discomfort in the reader is surpassed only by Peter Sotos and Andrea Dworkin, and it's no coincidence that all three of these writers rip open the still-raw wounds of human sexuality to find the glistening, unfeeling steel of power beneath.

The book should probably not be read all at once.