Women As Lovers [Paperback]

Elfriede Jelinek (Author), Martin Chalmers (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Masks | Publication Date: July 1, 1995

The setting is an idyllic Alpine village where a woman's underwear factory nestles in the woods. Two factory workers, Brigitte and Paula, dream and talk about finding happiness, a comfortable home and a good man. They realize that their quest will be as hard as work at the factory. Brigitte subordinates her feelings and goes for Heinz, a young, plump, up-and-coming businessman. With Paula, feelings and dreams become confused. She gets pregnant by Erich, the forestry worker. He's handsome, so they marry. Brigitte gets it right. Paula gets it wrong. Using the conventions and language of romantic fiction, Elfriede Jelinek has written a moving tragedy whose power lies in its refusal to take at face value its characters' dreams and aspirations.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This brief, pitiless novel advances such a narrow, bleak vision of the human race that one wonders why its author, who apparently finds everything pointless, saw the point in writing it. In oddly punctuated, repetitive prose reminiscent of Gertrude Stein's but lacking Stein's energetic compassion, Jelinek's (Lust and The Piano Teacher) latest doesn't have much good to say about love or marriage or sex or babies. And for Paula and Brigette, these are the only escapes from a life--if one can call it a life--of sewing bras in a factory in the mountains of Austria. It's hard to imagine even the pretense of love in a marriage to a drunken lout like Erich, the rotting apple of his sad, miserable parents' eye, or to fat and stupid Heinz. What shallow, covetous creatures women are, is what Jelinek seems to say. It doesn't matter if they don't enjoy sex; they don't deserve it, and anyway, someday we'll all be dead.

Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail; 2bd edition (July 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1852422378
• ISBN-13: 978-1852422370
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #233,553 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

116 of 131 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars need to be austrian?, May 14, 2002

By 

Harald Weinkum (Glendale, AZ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Women As Lovers (Paperback)

I HAD to add this in reaction to the published review. It might be hard for Americans to admit that all the depicted hopelessness, sexism and pointlessness exists in relationships, not only in Austria. We WISH it wouldn't, but it does. And the fact, that we have such a hard time admitting it is all the more reason for this book exist and be read.
I have come across the very same relationship patterns in the U.S., it's just the way this culture deals with it, that makes it hard for writers like Elfriede Jelinek to get the appreciation they deservre.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Deep psichology of modern time, March 26, 2006

By 

Matko Vladanovic (Zagreb, Croatia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Women As Lovers (Paperback)

To you out there, who perchance have never lived in smaller towns or villages of Europe (though I would dare to say that situation described here is pretty much the same everywhere), the world described in this novel of Elfriede Jelinek may feel awfull strange. Allmost impossible. We live and grow in "advanced" civilisation, we educate ourselves, attend to schools, feel free to question world around us and finaly, we refuse to be bound by that same world more than is necessary (or yet we perceive it that way). But believe it or not, in the same planet that we ourselves live in, there exist not so small community of Elfriede Jelinek's characters from this book.

There is a world without "prospect", with a church in the center of town, and one factory, owner of which is like a modern day dictator...as I write this down, it reminds me a lot of Simpson's Springfield. But without loveable characters, without joy of life, with only bare reality that is left and which we must satisfy ourselves with.

In their quest for identity, for happinnes, Jelinek's characters conduct themselves in a narrow world, trying to become queens in a small world, which, in a brilliant irony, does not care for queens at all. Only kings play their role which must be fulfilled and never questioned. To question would mean that one denies tradition and that one feels himself above the rest. As you may guess, that will not be allowed.

This is the first book of Elfriede Jelinek and in many things it stands for what shall later be known as her own writing style. That peculiar dark grey colouring of the world outside just starts to shape itself here, but her narrative discourse still doesn't concern itself with principles of relation man-woman in a magnitude that it does in later work.

This is very good book, one which shall introduce you to universe where only rare individulas would like to dwell. If you are already introduced, it will do you good to remind yourself...

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Riffing on Pasolini, March 21, 2011

By 

Yves Jaques (Rome, Italy) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Women As Lovers (Paperback)

Agree with Harald that the Publisher's Weekly review is so infantile in its analysis of this powerful novel that I just had to write another view. Far from being "oddly punctuated, repetitive prose" it uses allegorical tone and leitmotif to invoke a universal stage for its timeless message on the war of the sexes. It is also far from being "reminiscent of Gertrude Stein but lacking Stein's energetic compassion". It is instead archly intellectual applying the post-modernistic tone of Pasolini's Teorema with the fairy-tale horror of Robert Coover. As a voracious, omniverous reader who is interested in everything from Virgina Woolf and Margeurite Duras to the boys-club novels of Thomas Pynchon and Cormac McCarthy, I'm telling you do not miss this book.