Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, but I had never read her work before. One of her previous novels, The Piano Teacher, was apparently made into a film that won several prizes in Cannes in 2001, but I have never seen it. So I had little to prepare me for Greed, her latest work to be translated into English. But I did have some preparation: last year, as a bet, I read James Joyce’s Ulysses. There are many similarities. If you like complex, stream-of-consciousness literature, you’ll love this book.Greed is a kind of modernist crime novel. A number of crimes are committed, probably (nothing in this novel is clear) by an ambitious, frustrated country policeman amid the mountains and small towns of southern Austria. We are told quite early on that the country policeman, Kurt Janisch is 'completely dominated by a kind of greed'. This greed, we discover, is for property; specifically, the property of lonely middle-aged women on whom he preys. And Janisch’s story is related by one of these women who decides on page 4: I’d better take over the telling of the story myself now. Don’t interrupt!It is often quite difficult to understand exactly what is going on, but the gist of the story is that the country policeman uses his position of male authority to satisfy his greed. Meanwhile, a number of young women have gone missing, often tourists or hitchhikers or other vulnerable single women. It is not clear whether Janisch murdered them, although the implication is that he has. But his main preoccupation is acquiring property, something he does by seducing widows and other single older women. Women don't know how dangerous he really is, says the narrator. Then, at a key point in the book, it appears the country policeman murders the daughter of one of his victims (the murder itself is described in a typically complex and tangential way, until the narrator herself has to admit: Now I've lost the thread myself, the first set goes to you). Janisch dumps the victim's body in the lake, tidied up, wrapped up and removed from the earth and dispatched to the water.One of the reasons I found Greed such a difficult read is the degree of authorial intrusion into the narrative. Pages and pages of diatribe against man-made pollution, modern Austria, banks and financial institutions and the ownership of property, God and religion, shallow women and despicable men. This really is a novel about the difference between men and women, in which men are painted as beasts ruled by their penises who are ruining the planet, and women are portrayed as pretty damned stupid for allowing it all to happen. Jelinek (or at least, her narrator) has a low opinion of humankind. It was for this reason, I suspect, that whenever I put the book down I often found it hard to pick up again.The narrative is undoubtedly difficult to follow. The length of the very long and rambling, multi-clause sentences and complex paragraphs that run for pages without stopping for breath can be rather off-putting. For the reader, the best approach would appear to be to read Greed in the way I was advised to read Joyce’ Ulysses: that is, to not attempt to make sense of every word but to just 'go with the flow' and enjoy the ride. There is a story buried away in there somewhere, in the same way as the murder victims are hidden in the woods around the country policeman's village. And between the polemic there is quite a lot of pornographic sex. There is also a surprising amount of humour in this novel, too. When I did bring myself to return to the book after another much-needed break, I usually enjoyed reading it. But only for so long at a time.
I decided rereading Greed, after being scandalized in a recent conversation by the comparison someone dared make between Jelinek and Herta Mueller. I read Jelinek years ago, and only in German, and I would be ready to give in this much: the English translation doesn’t do her justice (I remember as my one personal literary ambition starting to translate Die Liebhaberinnen into Romanian in 2005, only to be detoured from my project and immensely disappointed by the translation published only months after I started - I don’t think Jelinek’s reputation amongst the Romanian public will soon recover, same for the English translation of Greed) but even so, there’s no comparison between the two.I love her prose-poetry writing, the depths she can go into the darkest corners of her characters’ psyche, her lucidity and her gift of playing with the language, the dry tones. Arguably, she is hard to swallow, and no one pudic should touch her novels, as psychological realism is repulsive to most, and truth is vulgar. What I think Jelinek masters, for those who can go past the derangement, is manoeuvreing this repulsion, and bringing the reader to a point from which they can witness the horror with a dispassionate eye.In Greed (and most of her novels alike), one feels that the masterplan is bringing everything abominable up front while no perspective is given (the novel is written in the present tense, and I think this is another strategy to allow the reader to feel equidistant from all characters and their actions). The narrative voice goes from the edge of sharp, dry coherence to the obscure, bubbling language of an old lady’s voice drifting into madness (for the horrors she's telling), with constant shifts of tone and register, that are admittedly making the reading more difficult, and adding to the alleged incoherence of the writing (also the interference of the narrator speaking about herself, as in “notes to self”, like “ that doesn't work, it is a repetition”, “ I can’t keep up with my characters” etc., it sort of breaks the epic line, like in a comedian's show, one can picture Eddie Izzard impersonating the note taker, but I guess one can feel for the tormenting labors of giving birth to characters, especially that in Greed, as in The Piano Teacher, Jelinek identifies with the needy piano teacher, then ridicules her - and women's in general - repellent eagerness to be loved and finally destroys her). But to dismiss Greed for its apparent disorder would be to misunderstand it, as the incoherence is merely a technique not to exhaust the reader with the horror and ugliness of its characters and to honor depth without compromising to the analgesic effect of realism).Greed is a remarkable read.
What do You think about Greed (2007)?
Well, I wish I could say I enjoyed reading this book, but I can't. I did find it bold, in a way, and certainly irreverent. If an author can be credited with courage for saying to hell with editing, then Jelinek is certainly courageous. All 300 pages runs as a kind of unstructured, repetitive, running mental commentary - the kind of thing, in short, that I wrote when I was an overconfident preteen who thought that editing was for people who couldn't write. That aspect made it not pleasurable to read. But if reading pleasure isn't everything, and surely it isn't, this was still a valuable read. I credit the author for coming up with very detailed descriptions of sex that still don't read as Harlequin romance sexcapades. Also the very current event style of incorporating popular notions of ecology, sex, property, and culture was something new to me. More than anything, though, reading this book was much more like watching television than reading fiction.
—Leandra Cate
When I was reading this, I got the impression that the narrator(s) was stuck in her living room on an overcast day, bitter, lonely and twitching the curtains, so it was interesting to learn that Jelinek is severely agoraphobic. The writing draws you in like that.She's a clever cynic, and I'm not sure there's enough about. Read this book and you fall straight into her fussy, angry prose, but it never feels off-putting, only honest. Everything is anxious, taut and paranoid.Um... not sure what more I want to say. Just that I thought this was great and it was a hugely surprising new favourite book of mine. If all novels were like this, not a lot of reading would get done, but every once in a while, what an amazing thing to pick up.
—Leo Robertson
