Customer Reviews

Wonderful, Wonderful Times

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Also, if you are interested in the lives of atypical teenagers. THere were parts of this book that were too, too violent. The style is very intense, objectified, and the author keeps her distance from the grotesque actions and words of her subjects. If you were riveted by A Clockwork Orange, you will like this book.

I should ask myselff, how will I present this book. Considering that I have written review (or what stands for those nowadays) of every (almost) book of Elfriede Jelinek here on Amazon, I should try to avoid repetiton of myself and start inventing few new phrases, what one could call - expanding ones vocabulary.

Even with my mind having set itself on that kind of track, it is hard not to repeat oneself. Evil tongues out there could say that it cannot be done in any other way since Jelinek writes same story over and over again. And, in a matter of speaking, they are right. Elfriede Jelinek does write same story over and over again. Reasons are numerous (as for argmuneted who can say). Though same they differ, and precisely that kind of differentiation is that tiny piece of intricate weaving which separates lousy writer from superb one. Problem manifest itself when one starts to dig for answers.

What is this novel about? It is the novel about degradation. about degradation of every aspect of civilisation that people are so accustomed to. Destruction of old ethics and morale, and iminent sturgle for creation of new order in a crumbling world of post-war Austria. In a world where hate crimes are being done not for hate, they are being done because they can be done, and people who did the are aware of the fact that no one (except, perhaps, the victim) will care.

In this novel we are observing something what could be ironically called "summer of love", yet there is no love. Or at least, there is no mere love. We follow the life of brother and sister who are growing intelectualls (in a best manner of Camus L'etranger), yet whose birtright is somewhat lower than they would like. They belong to middle class. Gang of four characters still holds one "depraved" worker and a member of burgeousie (female one). They create a world of their own.

Having trouble with identity, they try to create one of their own, complete with ethical system and system of values. Thought they seem in perfect unison, they are falling apart by different desires that propel every one of them on a different path. Chaos and mayhem should eventually occur.

Trough the minds of these young people Elfriede Jelinek shows us the decaying state of society which tends to hide its skeletons, having neither will nor power to destroy them or even acknowledge their existence. Rather pessimistic (as in all of hers work), "wonderfull wonderfull times" are, in a way, anti-philosophy, deconstruction of "manners".

If you decide to read this one (though I would recommend that you start with some easier and more "gleefull" work of hers), you will embark upon quest of rediscovery of culture, identity and meaning. All in one place.

Don't say I didn't warn you :)

I gave this book to my son for one of his Christmas presents. He loved it. He and I shop quite a bit through Amazon as we trust the company 100 percent.

Wonderful,Wonderful Times is the ironic title for a nasty, engrossing story of four young people in post-war Vienna. The author spares no mercy in skewering their character, their dreams, their hopes on her didactic pen. So much venom.

These are characters you will love to despise and which the author delights in showing in the worst possible light and is creative enough to make it almost poetic--if you see the beauty in psychic wounds which bleed hatred.

The plot is a series of encounters in which the young people--some parents and others are preipheral characters--meet and talk with the purpose of committing the perfect crime: unmotivationless, calculated.

How that comes about caught me by surprise, like a blow to the solar plexus.

Read it and weep--not for them but for mankind.

Published in 1980, Wonderful Wonderful Times is a novel whose title is a complete contradiction to anything of what the book is indicative of. Understood and accepted. For me, however, it was a confirming piece of drip-drab fiction that only reiterated my original assessment of her after reading the perennial fan favorite, The Piano Teacher, a butcher job of a novel if ever there was one. This novel could take second honors, however.

Set in the 1950s after WWII, Austria is trying to assume an air of normality and goodness, letting the past be the past and keeping the ghosts of history forcibly at bay. There are no spillover ramifications from the atrocities of war. In truth, that is untrue, but the character elders in Jelinek's stiff and poorly written and unconvincing novel would be hard pressed to have it otherwise, for their contaminated "children" are defects of a dark and wanted closeted history, poisoned brats who are extensions of the prior Hitlerian generation, perhaps a new "lost" generation.

By using internal thoughts and musings, Jelinek creates a battered, soulless, snotty teen world, pumped up with lust and all the trappings that so commonly ensnare youths with their more-often-than-not unfounded angst and bitterness. Forget the dark nether reaches of the goth world and the escapist play games of the mentally demented, for the four direct characters: Rainer Witkowski, his sister Anna, Hans Sepp and Sophie, their world is the here and right now. It is the prowling and the attacking, the lying and the arrogant indifference, the self-absorption and the truthfulness in all the horror of the above said actions, the Nazi element being in all of those traits that fostered the cruel lunacy of human evil. The teens are not retaliatory of the past. They are a modernized re incarceration of it. And herein is Elfriede Jelinek's greatest shortcoming. Her plot is simply unconvincing and poorly strung together, an altogether limp and trite piece of nonsense, just like the unremarkable The Piano Teacher.

The characters who have the potential for something greater are obviously stunted, even deliberately so, but their attempts at unmasking the hypocrisy of those in their immediate environment and even further away falls way too short, and no amount of ad-libbed "justified" philosophy as preached by Rainer compels those actions to be any more right than wrong. They are not preachers of reflection and healing. They are punks. They don't even come close. It is just too ridiculous and stupid, and I found myself saying, Give me a break! Mediocrity of this nature could be taught in a creative writing 101 class. This was dystopian fiction at its worst, and Anthony Burgess-were he still alive-could have taught Jelinek a thing or two.

Not long ago, members of the Nobel Academy were asked if mistakes had been made in who had and who had not been selected to be a Nobel laureate, for Jelinek was so honored in 2004 for the "musical flow of voices and counter-voices..." Admittedly, he said yes, that errors had happened, first and foremost that Karen Blixen also known as Isak Diensen, the Danish authoress of Out of Africa was not chosen, that that was a big regret. He said that some authors should not have been selected, but he stopped short as to mentioning who specifically. It made me wonder if it was a not-too-subtle swipe at Jelinek's surprise selection, for an academy member did resign his post due to his very strong beliefs in her lack of literary merit. If a reader must pick up this book, be wowed not by its supposed merit and accolades, be stupefied by its pretentiousness and sloppiness.

A very sardonic and withering look at Post-WW II Europe, Elfriede Jelinek's "Wonderful, Wonderful Times" is a book that few will enjoy reading, but one that casts a certain mordant spell nonetheless.

Jelinek writes pitilessly, dryly mocking adolescence, Fascism, Socialism, existentialist writers, class structures, and of course, human foibles. Her style is aggravating, I'd have to say, as she insists on actually inhabiting the grimy world she depicts, and not transcending it. She succeeds in conveying a kind of gestalt, a portrait of a social morass in which four hapless and somewhat stupid Austrian youths are trapped like canaries in a coalmine.

Though the young characters are introduced as loutish thugs, by the end of the novel Jelinek has created sympathy in the reader.

The message? "When you pull the plug on dreams, terrible things can happen".

This book came to me with recommendations from a good friend whose opinions I value. Its author, Elfriede Jelinek, has won a Nobel Prize for literature. There is no question but that the book is powerfully written even in translation. Nonetheless, I had trouble understanding what it had to say. It is not, as some of its reviewers have suggested, a book about postwar Austria. Its teenage protagonists are much angrier, much emptier, and much sillier than most of their contemporaries. Their parents are angry, empty, silly, and poisoned by something like history too but Herr Witkowski, a mass murderer and veteran of the SS is not representative of Austria in general. Neither is his pathetic doormat of a wife. Sophie's empty mother, the heir to a fortune made on the backs of slave labor in the family steel works, is not representative either. Sophie's contemporaries do not mug people in the park. Neither do they set off bombs in their schools or take sadistic voyeuristic pleasure from their class power. Most Austrian kids do not go about murdering their kith and kin.

What then is the book about? I take it Jellinek is exploring the dark side of her imagination and, of course, that may be a useful thing for her to do. I don't know, however, why I need to go along on that exploration. In the end the book felt awfully like a freak show. Even as child being taken to the circus I knew that there was something unseemly about those shows - the antithesis of the beautiful grace of the trapeeze. I turn out to still think so.