She raises her arms and massages her nipples, making them stand up straight. Then she sits down comfortably and splays her
legs apart…She toys playfully with her pubic hair”; “The two elderly women, with their dried, sealed vaginas, throw themselves in front of every man ,to keep him away from their fawn.” ; “The vaginal lips of the two women have turned into siliceous stone.” ; “Like a blind mole, the daughter reaches towards Mother’s body, but Mother shovels Erika’s hands away. For a brief moment, Erika manages to see her mother’s sparse pubic hair, which closes off the fat belly… Mother has always rigorously kept this pubic hair under lock and key. During the struggle, the daughter deliberately shoved around in her mother’s nightgown, so that she could finally see this pubic hair which she has always known as there…Erika cunningly uncovered her mother so she could see everything, simply everything.”; “Klemmer wildly thrusts his penis into her mouth, but the proof he wants is wanting. His slack cock floats in her water: an unfeeling cock”. These are lines from the novel THE PIANO TEACHER, written by the celebrated Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek who received Nobel prize for 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.” . It was, therefore quite a surprise for the people who considered Jelinek’s writings to be pornographic , when she was selected for the coveted Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. The central character of the novel is Erica Kohut, Piano Teacher of the famous Vienna Conservatory who lives with her mother in Vienna. Erika both loves and hates her mother but she cannot leave her. she has had enough and rebels against her mother by doing forbidden things. She doesn't come home in time and she visits bad neighbourhoods where she watches people having sex. While she spends her day in the conservatory with rigorous discipline, she spends her evenings in seedy sex booths watching pornographic films and live sex shows and evesdropping on lovers in parks. She even indulges in painfully deliberate acts of
masochism like self mutilation etc. in the privacy of her bathroom. Untouched by love of any kind, Erika derives perverse satisfaction with what she sees in these places. Walter Klemmer, a handsome engineering student with an interest in classical music, particularly in Schubert , meets Erika at a party and begins to flirt with her. He becomes one of her students, but Erika does not respond to his advances. When she sees Walter developing intimacy with one of her female students she cruelly mars her opportunity to play in a jubilee concert. Finally she develops
relationship with Klemmer solely on her terms and conditions. but Erika's dominatiing and suffocating relationship with her mother complicates things. The relationship ultimately brings devastation and destruction to her. Vienna, the capital of Austria is famous for being the city of High Arts, i.e., Art and Music. In this backdrop. the corrupt middle-class mentality cropping up in Austria after the second world war, has been graphically reflected in the novel. The frustrations of the author over the failure of the de-Nazification movement in West Germany have found ventilation in the novel. During the Allied Occupation ,the Austrians hated the Russian occupiers more than they hated Hitler. Instead of sticking to traditional literary techniques, Jelinek adhered to linguistic and thematic experimentations in a magnificent way in this semi-autobiographical novel.