Greed (Jelinek novel)

Last updated

Greed
Greed (Jelinek novel).jpg
Author Elfriede Jelinek
Original titleGier
TranslatorMartin Chalmers
CountryGermany
LanguageGerman
Publisher Rowohlt Verlag, Seven Stories Press
Publication date
2000
Published in English
2006
Pages461
ISBN 3-498-03334-4

Greed (German: Gier) is a 2000 novel by the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek. It was the first novel of hers to be translated into English after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, and also the first book of hers to be translated into English in seven years. The English translation was published in the UK by Serpent's Tail in 2006 and in the US by Seven Stories Press in 2007. [1] While much of her work is rooted in the Austrian literary tradition, she has also been known to take a feminist stand on the dealings of the Communist Party of Austria.

Contents

Plot

The novel tells the story of a policeman who kills a 15-year-old girl while she is performing fellatio and then dumps the body in a lake.

Reception

Philip Hensher of The Daily Telegraph wrote: "About 100 pages into this atrocious novel, I suddenly couldn't bear it one second longer. I thought: before I go any further, I want to read something amusing, lucid, interesting and straightforward." [2] Hensher continued: "A story of some sort emerges, but the thrust of the novel is really the most vulgar and stupid commentary imaginable about the murderous misogyny of men, the environment, the appalling taste of the kleinburgerlicher and so on. ... Densely unreadable as it is, there is something terribly banal about every one of its intellectual propositions; as hopelessly banal in its attempted chic as its predominant present tense." [2] Lucy Ellmann reviewed the book for The Guardian , and wrote that it provides just what the literary landscape needs: "Philip Roth says the novel is dead, but it would be more accurate to say the audience is dead – we're all just too polite to mention it. What is killing the novel is people's growing dependence on feel-good fiction, fantasy and non-fiction. ... Real writing is not about rules. It's about electrifying prose, it's about play." [3] Ellmann wrote: "Jelinek gives us a startling glimpse here of what women are, as well as answering Freud's question, 'What do women want?' It's neither gentle nor sweet nor safe nor reasonable – just true." [3]

Joel Agee wrote in The New York Times : "Jelinek has described herself as a kind of scientist who dispassionately 'looks into the petri dish of society.' But her procedure in Greed is more like that of a prosecuting attorney in a trial of the indefensible, with effigies standing in for the accused, no judge or jury, no court protocol and of course no counsel for the defense. ... No one else, except perhaps a conscientious reviewer, would sit out her entire presentation." [4]

Nicholas Spice of the London Review of Books saw parallels between the main character and Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities and Georg Büchner's Woyzeck . Spice wrote: "In Greed, Jelinek finds a way to deal with depth (with the abyss inside the human) without either reverting to the analgesic of realism or exhausting the reader with flood-lit ugliness. For all its derangement, Greed is not ugly. Indeed, once one has got used to it, it yields strange and memorable pleasures." However, Spice added: "With its constant shifts of tone and register, the slippery sideways movement of thought through wordplay and punning, the frequent allusions to other German texts, the idiom of Greed poses almost insuperable obstacles to good translation. ... As it is, doubtless under tight economic constraints, the publishers have paid for a hit-and-miss, standard, 'by the page' translation and the result is a disaster. It's hard to imagine that Jelinek's reputation in the English-speaking world will ever recover." [5]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Joyce</span> Irish novelist and poet (1882–1941)

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. Joyce's novel Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, particularly stream of consciousness. Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, letters, and occasional journalism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oscar Wilde</span> Irish poet, playwright, and aesthete (1854–1900)

Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at the age of 46.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Musil</span> Austrian philosophical writer

Robert Musil was an Austrian philosophical writer. His unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities, is generally considered to be one of the most important and influential modernist novels.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ingeborg Bachmann</span> Austrian poet and author

Ingeborg Bachmann was an Austrian poet and author. She is regarded as one of the major voices of German-language literature in the 20th century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elfriede Jelinek</span> Austrian playwright and novelist

Elfriede Jelinek is an Austrian playwright and novelist. She is one of the most decorated authors to write in German and was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature for her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power". Along with Peter Handke and Botho Strauss, she is considered to be among the most important living playwrights of the German language.

<i>A Death in the Family</i> 1957 novel by James Agee

A Death in the Family is an autobiographical novel by James Agee. It was based on events which occurred to Agee in 1915, when his father went out of town to see his own father, who had suffered a heart attack. During the return trip, Agee's father was killed in a car crash.

<i>À rebours</i> 1884 book by Joris-Karl Huysmans

À rebours is an 1884 novel by the French writer Joris-Karl Huysmans. The narrative centers on a single character: Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive, ailing aesthete. The last scion of an aristocratic family, Des Esseintes loathes nineteenth-century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. The narrative is almost entirely a catalogue of the neurotic Des Esseintes's aesthetic tastes, musings on literature, painting, and religion, and hyperaesthesic sensory experiences.

Austrian literature is mostly written in German, and is closely connected with German literature.

Illness or Modern Women is a play by the Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek. It was published in 1984 in the avant-garde journal manuscripte of Graz and premiered on the stage of the Schauspielhaus Bonn on February 12, 1987, directed by Hans Hollmann. The play was published in book form by Prometh Verlag in 1987 with an afterword by Regine Friedrich. The title "parodically conflates women with illness." The play is based on an earlier, shorter radio play by Jelinek called Erziehung eines Vampirs, which appeared in 1986 on Süddeutscher Rundfunk.

Philip Michael Hensher FRSL is an English novelist, critic and journalist.

Marlen Haushofer was an Austrian author, most famous for her novel The Wall (1963).

The Wall is a 1963 novel by Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer. Considered the author's finest work, The Wall is an example of dystopian fiction. The English translation by Shaun Whiteside was published by Cleis Press in 1990.

Damion Searls is an American writer and translator. He grew up in New York and studied at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in translating literary works from Western European languages such as German, Norwegian, French, and Dutch. Among the authors he has translated are Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, Kurt Schwitters, Peter Handke, Jon Fosse, Heike B. Görtemaker, and Nescio. He has received numerous grants and fellowships for his translations.

<i>My Year in the No-Mans-Bay</i>

My Year in the No-Man's-Bay is a 1994 novel by the Austrian writer Peter Handke. It follows a writer's attempt to describe a metamorphosis he went through two decades earlier, when he stopped being confrontative and instead became a passive observer. The task proves to be difficult and most of the book is instead concerned with the lives of the narrator, his family and the people in the Paris suburb where he lives. The book is 1066 pages long in its original German. It was published in English in 1998, translated by Krishna Winston.

<i>The Anti-Death League</i> 1966 novel by Kingsley Amis

The Anti-Death League is a 1966 novel by English author Kingsley Amis (1922–1995). Set in England, it follows the lives of characters working in and around a fictional British Army camp where a secret weapon is being tested.

Joel Agee is an American writer and translator. He lives in New York.

<i>Ducks, Newburyport</i> 2019 novel by Lucy Ellmann

Ducks, Newburyport is a 2019 novel by British author Lucy Ellmann. The novel is written in the stream of consciousness narrative style, and consists of a single long sentence, with brief clauses that start with the phrase "the fact that" more than 19,000 times. The book runs over 1000 pages. It won the 2019 Goldsmiths Prize and was shortlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize.

<i>The Unspeakable Skipton</i> 1959 comic novel by Pamela Hansford Johnson

The Unspeakable Skipton is a comic novel by the British author Pamela Hansford Johnson, written in 1959.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2004 Nobel Prize in Literature</span> Award

The 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek "for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power". She is the tenth female and the first Austrian Nobel laureate followed by Peter Handke in 2019.

Novelist as a Vocation is a book written by Haruki Murakami which was published in November 8, 2022 by Doubleday Canada.

References

  1. "Greed". sevenstories.com. Retrieved 23 August 2021.
  2. 1 2 Hensher, Philip (1 October 2006). "The lady in the lake". The Daily Telegraph . Retrieved 10 April 2012.
  3. 1 2 Ellmann, Lucy (28 October 2006). "'I can't keep up with myself'". The Guardian . Retrieved 10 April 2012.
  4. Agee, Joel (15 April 2007). "By a Dead Lake". The New York Times . Retrieved 10 April 2012.
  5. Spice, Nicholas (5 June 2008). "Up from the Cellar". London Review of Books . 30 (11): 3–8. Retrieved 10 April 2012.