Erika’s life is a strange compromise. She travels the commuter trains of Vienna and takes perverse pleasure out of kicking people on the crowded trains and watching as they blame somebody else, usually somebody who looks less respectable than her professorial-looking self. She will stamp on the bursting feet of overweight women and enjoy when the victim chides an innocent working class man.

In the evenings on her way home from work, Erika visits the seedy pornographic film theatres and live sex shows, in the city. She takes her turn among the mainly Turkish and Greek working men, to watch the pink flesh as it parades and acts out the lewd fantasies of the viewers.

Utterly untouched by love of any hue, Erika has a stoic fascination with what she sees in these places and it drives her on when she realises that one of her students desires her. A young, virile, talented, sporty type, Walter Klemmer is passionate about life. As he expounds on his love of music, he secretly burns for Erika’s barren body. When they do get together Erika lets go of all her inhibitions and begins a journey into S&M and complete and total degradation. The job started by her mother is ultimately finished off by herself with the gusto of an erupting volcano.

Erika is a perfectly detailed and rounded creation, a woman so beaten and wrought entirely by her mother’s own neuroses, a person devoid of compassion because of her own lack of experience of it. Her self-loathing manifests itself in her self-mutilation. As the narrative skips back in her memory to her younger years, we witness her cutting herself as, during holiday time, her cousins play and swim with the frolicking spirit youth, while she at her mothers insistence practises at her piano. While the mother indulges and seems to enjoy the mirth and fun of the others she cannot allow Erika to join in. In her room Erika cuts herself and watches the blood dripping. Revenge on her mother and herself, it becomes something she can control and she continues the practise in later life.

As romance and sex bypass her, Erika is constantly warned about men by her mother. They are no good, she tells her, only after one thing. It is that one thing which becomes so elusive for Erika that she develops a perverse fascination with it.

By the time she embarks on the affair with Klemmer, Erika is so fucked up that sex is something she cannot do for the reasons others do it. It too becomes an aggressive release for her bottled and confused emotions. It also comes to be something she thinks she can control.

The theme of control is central to ‘The Piano Teacher’ having been controlled for her entire life, Erika - as is natural - desires to exert a similar type of cruel control herself. And so her students are her obvious outlet. As, too, is her own body. The relationship with Klemmer takes the form of a ‘degrading’ of her body and her impulses. She wants to be beaten by him, gagged and tied. As her mother vented her frustrations on her, so she too vents her own on herself.

We get glimpses of her innocence through her still-intact love of music, particularly that of Schubert. He remains the ideal for her notion of romantic art. It is the one thing she is truly in love with.

Jelinek creates an almost Dickensian world when she paints the picture of the working class ghettos Erika visits to satisfy her hunger for the visual pleasures afforded by the sex shows. Full of no-good men spending their last pennies on brief titillation or slightly longer sessions with prostitutes, while hungry children’s cries pour out of tenements windows, along with vulgar language from the real desperate housewives. Acutely observational, Jelinek drops gems of insight into the narrative every so often, touching on the hardship of life and the tender frailties of the human condition.

A starkly powerful, darkly expressionistic book, ‘The Piano Teacher’ - through its third-person narration - remains aloof and non-judgemental at all times. It tells its story unflinchingly, without recourse to anything resembling a moralising tone. As a study of a life, it shows what can happen when somebody grows up in a loveless environment. Its almost clinical feel, veering towards claustrophobic at times, remains compelling throughout.

It is unavoidable that some things will be lost in translation, but regardless, Jelinek’s tale is fully formed and revealing. Made into a film by Michael Haneke, with French actress Isabelle Huppert playing the role of Erika. Huppert won the prize for best actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 2001, one of the three awards the film received there.

’The Piano Teacher’ is regarded as Jelinek’s masterpiece. It was doubtless instrumental in the decision of the Nobel Committee to confer the author with its literature prize last year.

Sean Walsh is 30 years old and lives with his wife and two children near the town Killala in Co. Mayo. As a music and arts writer his work has appeared in publications such as artswest, CAFE News, Céide Review, magpie magazine, Hot Press and Irish Music magazine. He is also currently film critic with the Connaught Telegraph newspaper. After dropping out of college while studying Philosophy, he blagged his way into working in arts administration, which he still does. Currently completing an Open University Hons Degree in Humanities (one more module to go), he hopes to get down to serious writing soon.

© 2005 Laura Hird All rights reserved.