Customer Reviews

Lust

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Incredibly difficult. To read. And at times impossible to comb out meanings. Metaphors on top of metaphors. Spiraling out to the limited edge of an intensely debauched world. Must be able to stomach oppression well. Offers death and sex different, but same treatments. Not a book for everyone.
Critics of Lust criticize its nauseating repetition. True to some extent. But the repetition has a forced of its own, and with a great deal of patience and discipline, the repetition bears beautiful fruits. The dance of oppression, erotica, and abuse like a literary machine can't be swallowed with ease. Mastication is difficult. Elfriede Jelinek ought to be applauded for her intense focus and extraordinary manhandling of the difficult subject of Lust.
Some favorite excerpts from the book (brilliant prose):
"If you ask me, postcards treat landscape more sparingly than time treats women." -p.134
"Her thighs under the panty-hose are sticky with the Direktor's daily slime. He likes to show that he could duplicate himself if he wanted, even if there's not much ink in his machine any more." -p. 135
"And there they go, leafing through the catalogues of exotic women, high performance models that are more economical to run and need less fuel." -p.93
"Many have to take terrible buses and regret it terribly where they remain on the wrong genitals for too long."-p.89

In spite of the her mastery of seamless metaphor, pithy wit and clever turn of phrase, it has be concluded by page 43: this book needs a huge amount of editing and structural modification to make it a satisfactory read, from anybody’s point-of-view. It’s just so unnecessarily and relentlessly repetitive.

Farther on, many of the jump-cuts simply don’t make sense with respect to their purpose. And there are too many occasions in which the elegance of her language is abandoned for a dead straight statement, about Herman’s or Michael’s conduct. And it would have been a lot better to refer to ‘the woman’ as Gerti and the Direktor as Herman, throughout.

Some commentators make the erroneous assertion that this is an indictment of Capitalism. This is not true. It is an indictment of gangsterism and the inability of those under such a tyrannical regime to progress towards Capitalism.

Nobel Prize Winner Elfriede Jelinek is obviously a very talented writer. But Lust does not do her talents any favours. Despite that, it deserves a high mark for skillful prose.

I admit that I found it strange that no one Amazon reader had reviewed this book, given that the author won the Nobel prize for literature. I discovered the former fact after I read the book and was wondering what other people thought of it.
Honestly, the book is a primal scream, figuratively, from beginning to end, it's a 200 page rape scene, made up of mind numbing muliple rape scenes, mostly by a man the author calls either "The Man" or Herr Direcktor for most of the book, as it's an allegory, and directed at his wife. The book is an assault to one's senses. Over and over and over. Jelinek makes her point in mindnumbing fashion. Being a "man" with a small "m" I suppose I shouldn't take it personally, but men do come off rather badly in this book.And if one is so inclined, you could call this a "feminist manifesto" of sorts. And again, I read it as an allegory. Beware, it's not for the faint of heart, and the sex scenes are disturbing, and not erotic, nor were they, I suppose, meant to be -- as that's the point.

There is a certain kind of uncomfortable silence when someone mentions Elfriede Jelinek, especially in a circle of literary critics, authors and most of all Austrians. Not so much of femme fatale but more like a destructor of modern pre-concepts of society. As it happens, no one likes destructor very much. Of grassy highlands and pictoresque little towns of Austria remained bleak destruction of every cliche out there. There are no "fine" ladies anymore which love theirs husbands and whose husband love them. There are no sweet children playing in the garden obeying their parents, being sweet as kids are supposed to be. Austria form the postcard doesen't exist. Nor it has ever existed.
In the shapeless cloud that became Austria, there are much to be done yet. One of those things is setting the nature of man-woman relationship in the right place.

What would one happen nowadays? Well one does not get it.
For Jelinek, women is piece of meat, and as meat she has to have its owner. And, naturally it is her husband. To destroy something that exist one has to try living inside it.

There were much talk of kind of language used in this novel. Some of it was aimed towards high pornographical value of it. So it is. But, in a words of Elfriede Jelinek "only man is able to produce pornography". Constant repetitions of sexually explicit (I almost said lyrics) scenes is mere mechanism of their destruciton.

Maybe it is true that this novel lacks a plot or any kind of interesting narrative. And because of it some may find it boring.

But, what remains of highly "engaged" text is great passion "to fix wrongness" in world. And to do that one has to be, in Jelineks own words, banished into the sidelines ("im abseits").

To be read and be thinked upon

I first discovered Jelinek about a year ago; I was amazed. The Piano Teacher: A Novel, for all its macabre violence and the horror of it subject matter, is a novel of astonishing power; Wonderful, Wonderful Times is one of the most perfectly crafted pieces of fiction I have ever encountered, filled with beautiful lyricism, rich in symbolism and connotation...

Then I came to this volume, "Lust." Much as I enjoyed Jelinek's other works, I found this to be one of the most worthless volumes I have ever encountered. Formally speaking, it is interesting enough: no quotations or direct speech; no view to the interior of any of the characters, only a reportage of their external actions. (Jelinek has experimented with this technique in previous novels.)

As for the content of this book...there are only a few characters: The Boss, most commonly referred to as The Man, who is a supervisor at the local factory; his wife (Gerti), most commonly referred to merely as She; their self-absorbed young son, who takes after The Man. Literally about half of the narrative consists of graphic descriptions of The Man sexually abusing The Woman, making use (against her will) of every available orifice. (Occasionally Jelinek's narrator turns to the [presumably male] readers of the book and says: "don't pretend that this sexual violence doesn't turn you on...")

Other than violent sexual content, this work consists primarily of a Marxist diatribe in the form of an allegory. "Yeah, yeah, I get it," I kept saying to myself as I read the book. "The Man is men, the Woman is subjected women, the townspeople are the exploited masses..."

So what? There's no new insight here, no psychological exploration or brilliant commentary, only an overused allegory so ossified as to be meaningless.

Read The Piano Teacher and Wonderful Wonderful Times, they're worthwhile. Skip this emetic and worthless volume.

I didn't finish reading it. It was too abstract for me to follow the plot. And the tone is so angry that it's not even really believable. Maybe it would've been believable in the 1960s, perhaps as sort of a companion to The Yellow Wallpaper.

Reflect on the sheer volume of books published every year around the world. Reflect further on the number of languages in which these books are written. These numbers alone will warn against expectations of a meaningful system of awards, recognition, etc. when it comes to the Nobel prize in literature.
Remember also that Mark Twain, Chekhov, Oscar Wild, Leo Tolstoy were all superseded by utterly forgotten *others* by the fickle Nobel.
It should then come as no surprise that Lust is trash. Garbage. Its terribly written. Admittedly, I dont speak German, so am unable to definitely judge who is at fault here - the author or the translator. I suspect its largely the author. Example: "edifying edifices" is a sentence in Lust. Thats it. Thats the sentence. Its like some sophomoric butchery. Reminds me of the papers I wrote when asked to imitate Joyce's "stream of consciences", in 12th grade......
The emperor most definitely has no clothes here. Its painful to read due both to the writing itself and the half-formulated ideas expressed therein. When you tell me about a book by a post-WWII German, i think Boll, Grass. This latest name, Jelinek, does not belong. I just hope she will vanish in the not-too distant future, by way of the authors who received this prize instead of Tolstoy, Twain and Chekhov. Who were they, again?