Lust

"Lust is a novel about rape in marriage, and again is a novel about power relationships within marriage. It tells the story of Gerti, who is trapped in a sexually and psychologically abusive relationship—it’s unflinching and it’s possibly the most relentless of Jelinek’s novels, which is saying quite a lot. I don’t think Jelinek is interested in plot. She’s not even interested in psychology . She does play a lot with fairy tales—she has written a series of works for theatre that are sometimes referred to as the Princess Plays, or the Princess Dramas, and which deconstruct figures like Snow White or Jackie Kennedy. “It’s the darkest version of a fairy tale, more Brothers Grimm than Disney” And I suppose there is a simplicity to the narrative structure, that is fable-like. But it’s the darkest version of a fairy tale, in which daily violence is a key part. It’s more Brothers Grimm than Disney. I think it’s an interesting book because you can sense that she’s trying to locate a language that is not colonized by male experience, and that—even for a writer as brilliant and inventive as Jelinek—this is extremely difficult. You have the sense of echoes and of citation, of language that has been appropriated. Whether or not she feels she succeeded, it truly does not feel like a novel that could have been written by a man, and reading it, you understand how rare that is. It still is; Jelinek is still controversial—even with the Nobel prize, even with all the awards that she has won throughout her career, she remains undomesticated. That’s pretty extraordinary. She’s been recognized and rewarded by the institution [of marriage] but she remains apart from it. I’ve spoken with a few of her translators, and they’ve all commented on the difficulty of translating her prose, because there are so many puns that are specific to the German language. But most interesting to me was something Damion Searls said, which is that one of the most challenging things is preserving the awkwardness of her prose, of maintaining its particularity. I don’t have any German, and can only read in the translation, but to me it feels like her translators have succeeded in this."