The Piano Teacher

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, Barcelona, Columna, 2004 (1983)

Is the story of an attraction and repulsion between the enigmatic piano teacher Erika Kohut and the young pupil Walter Klemm. This situation limits the human condition that Jelinek knows how to deal with great skill. The intrepid reader attends to the achievement of self-harm by Erika, while initiating the celebration of Walter. The teacher, with forty completed and fully dependent life of the mother, shows great immaturity in dealing with the possible relationship with the young pretender. This is one of the strengths of the novel, the right balance in the treatment of the passion that the characters between them and the manifest difficulty. The daughter, Erika, who hates the mother, but at the same time want-with-included attempted rape, the teacher who wants the student, but at the same time it marks the distance, the student who refuses to carry out the program masochistic acts with the esteemed professor, but while dealing with violence as they approach. There is a lot of inconsistencies between the desires and the realization of acts between the characters that overwhelm the reader, but may do nothing to stop the situation or try to straighten it. Jelinek seems the laboratory researcher, once it has located the elements of the experiment, the three main characters, let them do as their instincts.

It is clear that the author’s autobiographical elements do not hide. His knowledge of the world of piano is performed as well as the difficult relationship with her mother as I have seen in several interviews and even in his biography written by Yasmin Hoffmann (Elfriede Jelinek. Une biographie, 2005) – are Parts easy to find on this novel. In this way, we can also observe the correction of Michael Haneke’s film adaptation made in 2001. All the works of the 2004 Nobel Prize address violence as a contact point between the characters, with the clear intention to terminate its existence in the quiet and falsely democratic societies of the West. The woman becomes, especially in the piano in the center of this violence, either as actant, as well as receiving. Is a difficult cohabitation in which Erika becomes both victim and executioner, from its peculiar conception of life. A reality that is justified through the development of the story, the psychological pressure of a possessive mother-named by the narrator as “mother lion” (p. 143), among other findings, and a father who was absent from suggests that sexually approached the young daughter. A series of traumas that build, effectively, a woman who can not love as it should and that is through the destruction the only way forward.

The Austrian author language is direct, without any prevention, a particularly noteworthy because this is one of its main points. The fact that gives a very harsh criticism and well-off society of their country, the complaint implicitly maintaining the Nazi ideology is not so new, if we look to the precedent of other writers of the same state as they did: Elias Canetti and Thomas Bernhard, without going any further. The will of provocation, especially in relation to the situation of women in society that portrays the writer, provides phrases such as:

* “The two women and elders, with the genitalia closed and dry, are thrown against any man who cannot get close to her calf. [...] The labia of the two older women, rigid and silicified with the opened and closed grating dry, like the claws of a flying beetle dying, but cannot catch anything. “(Pag. 36)

* “Key to a student and another a look that could cut glass [...]. It is precisely the gesture that he wanted to break his mother’s head, the day he failed at the concert.” (P. 63)

* “It is happy to have his age, has not taken anything to change the youth for experience. [...] Although in short, what counts are the creases, folds, cellulite, gray hair, bags under the eyes, open pores, false teeth, glasses and strain the body. “(Pp. 156-157)

* “Is a deep chasm of about seventeen centimeters member Erika arm and a ten-year difference between their bodies.” Page 167)