Wonderful, Wonderful Times

by Elfriede Jelinek

Overview

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 ageed 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781852421687
Publisher:	Serpent's Tail Publishing Ltd
Publication date:	06/01/1990
Series:	Masks Series
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Elfriede Jelinek was born in Austria in 1946 and grew up in Vienna where she attended the famous Music Conservatory. The leading Austrian writer of her generation, she has been awarded the Heinrich Böll Prize for her contribution to German literature. The film by Michael Haneke of The Piano Teacher won the three main prizes at Cannes in 2001. In 2004, Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Editorial Reviews

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 brilliant new novel, an unrelenting and horrifying exploration of postwar Austria...,The writing is so strong, it reads as if it wasn't written down at all, but as if the author's demon spirit is entering first a boy and then a girl, a structure, a thing, a totality, to let it speak its horrible truth.

From the Publisher

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. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly