Wonderful, Wonderful Times [Paperback]

Elfriede Jelinek (Author), Michael Hulse (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1, 1990 | Series: Masks

'That's brutal violence on a defenceless person, and quite unnecessary, declares Sophie, and she pulls with an audible tearing sound at the hair of the man lying in an untidy heap on the ground. What's unnecessary is best of all, says Rainer, who wants to go on fighting. We agreed on that.' It is the late 1950s. A man is out walking in a park in Vienna. He will be beaten up by four teenagers, not for his money, he has an average amount, nor for anything he might have done to them, but because the youths are arrogant and very pleased with themselves. Their arrogance is their way of reacting to the maggot-ridden corpse that is Austria where everyone has a closet to hide their Nazi histories, their sexual perversions and their hatred of the foreigner. Elfriede Jelinek, who writes like an angel of all that is tawdry, shows in "Wonderful, Wonderful Times" how actions of the present are determined by thoughts of the past.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A dozen years after the collapse of the Third Reich, four adolescents commit a gratuitously violent assault and robbery in a Viennese park. So begins Jelinek's ( The Piano Teacher ) brilliant new novel, an unrelenting and horrifying exploration of postwar Austria, where the sins of the fathers are visited upon a new generation too disaffected to understand the source of its inarticulate rage. Jelinek's prose is breathless and incisive as she paints psychological portraits of her characters in swift, sure brushstrokes. Among the group of young criminals in the park are Rainer Witkowski, a liar and a coward who fancies himself a poet, an intellectual and a leader of men, and his twin sister, Anna, who responds to rejection by losing her ability to speak. Their father, Otto, is a brutally sadistic, crippled ex-Nazi who takes pornographic pictures of his battered wife and whose sexual abilities are failing now that the aphrodisiac of Auschwitz is only a dim memory. He is unrepentant; history, he believes, has forgiven him. The son cites Sartre's proposition that history does not exist. But it does, and it repeats itself here in an explosion of sickeningly familiar violence.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Serpent's Tail (July 1, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1852421681
• ISBN-13: 978-1852421687
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #946,168 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dark, accusatory, brilliant, April 18, 2005

By 

scott89119 "scott89119" (Whittier, CA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Wonderful, Wonderful Times (Paperback)

I only became aware and interested in Jelinek after her Nobel win, because to be honest I'd never heard about her beforehand (not many in the U.S. have.) After surviving the black elegance of The Piano Teacher I decided to read this one next, intrigued by the setup and interested in how she would present this material. Overall, it serves as a brutal companion piece to The Piano Teacher; whereas the former is about the morbidity within the instructor, this one explores the sick tendencies inherent in the pupils. The four teenagers who steal, lie, beat, and (in one case) murder are all metaphors for Jelinek's portrait of modern-day Austria as a wasteland full of twisted secrets and a general disreguard for life. One wouldn't think it'd be worthwhile to spend free time exploring such subject matter, but Jelinek's storytelling abilities are so confident enough, her prose so determined enough, and her ability to make sadism blase strong enough, that you leave the novel wondering where the sharp kick in the guts came from. Each of the kids embodies a specific trait that contributes to the gloom following everyone around, and in time all the lust, violence, revenge, and anger permeating the text culminates in a grotesque act repellant in any other book, but in Jelinek's world seems quite fitting. This book is for anyone interested in dense literature unflattering to the human condition. While unsettling, it is also very necessary.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, Wonderful Literature, May 20, 2005

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Dawn O then A "Dawn" (Atlanta, Ga.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wonderful, Wonderful Times (Paperback)

In a time when our own children are shooting their classmates to relieve their sense of isolation, this book is a must. By a Nobel Prize winner, it is a study of youth's disaffection and how it is created by that youthful tendency toward idealism - idealism that is often simply idealism against society instead of for something - and class differences. Although it takes place in a particularly drifting and disrupted time and place, those years after the second world war in Europe, it seems pretty topical. The events of this book not only can happen, they do happen.

For writer's this book is fascinating as well. It is written in an almost anti-modern third person. One that is fully omniscient and dryly reportorial. And yet, that distance is the what allows us to fully understand the inner and outer lives of the characters. It's brilliant.

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Be Careful What You're Looking For, January 9, 2006

By 

Randy Keehn (Williston, ND United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wonderful, Wonderful Times (Paperback)

I like to check out Nobel Prize-winning novelists. I even look forward to each October with the hopes of discovering (for myself) a new Isaac B. Singer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Heinrich Boll, Grazia DeLadda, Knut Hamsun, Sinclair Lewis, Jose Saramago, or some other outstanding author. There are some choices that I read who didn't appeal to me but it was still worth the look. Elfriede Jelinek fits in to the latter category for me. I had known that she was a controversial selection when she got the award in 2004. When I looked uo her works, I came across titles like "Lust", "Women as Lovers", "Desire" and others that left me reluctant to go further. However, "Wonderful Wonderful Times" looked more positive; it isn't. It starts out violently and ends even more so and none of it made any sense although the author did her best to give it meaning.

I have to admit that I had trouble getting through this book. It is depressing and it focusses on a generation without purpose in modern day Austria. Half way through i thought of limiting the time I was wasting on "Wonderful Wonderful Times". However, I decided to stick with it. As I read more I began to realize that I was getting the author's meaning (I think). In a world that is born out of shameful defeat, what can a successive generation grasp for a foundation to build upon. What standards of ethics and morality exist when an entire country sided with a total absence of ethics and morality in WWII. The result is not a pretty sight to see and the question I had to ask myself was whether to blame or praise the messenger. I chose both, I chose neither.

I have searched for many years for a book that brings to life what it must have felt like to return to a homeland that was as disgraced in defeat as was Nazi Germany and its' Axis allies or, to a lesser extent, Imperialist Japan. I have found some that have come close to letting me sense what I had assumed to be the dual depressions of shame and loss. I'm not sure why I felt a need to understand this except to realize that these modern day countries have shown that rehabilitation is achievable in relatively short time. I wanted to understand what the steps of the process were like. Ironically, I think "Wonderful Wonderful Times" has come closer to that theme than just about anything else I've read. However, it gave me a picture darker that what I thought I'd find. Do I blame Jelinek for the reality I was looking for or do I realize that I had already decided what it was I wanted to find irregardless of whether it was the truth or not. I don't know if Jelinek has given us the real truth or just a skewered, angry version of what she thought of as the truth.

I found "Wonderful Wonderful Times" to be a hard book to want to keep reading and with a message that I want to be way off-target. I'm not sure if my disappointment rests with the author or with the truth.