From the outset Brigitte plans to marry the plump odious Heinz. A qualified electrician, Heinz is seen by Brigitte as a fine prize and wonderful husband material. She revels in the potential opportunities offered by Heinz’s plans to open an electrical appliance shop one day and be a businessman. Heinz’s parents detest her and regard her as certainly not worthy to marry their son. They have eyes on Heinz’s future earnings too, and harbour their own dreams of a better life bought with Heinz’s training and qualifications. Despite the efforts of Heinz’s mother, the tenacious Brigitte persists, a woman with a plan intent on seeing it realised.

Paula meanwhile is introduced to us as a young woman with her heart set solely on achieving her own qualifications and her thoughts are consumed by the better life which having a trade will afford her. She loathes the monotony of her work at the factory and the housework she must do at home. She sometimes escapes to the cinema where she loses herself in the beautiful world portrayed in front of her eyes on the silver screen. She is a dreamer but one who seems to be prepared to roll up her sleeves and work hard to achieve her goals. Dressmaking consumes her thoughts, despite her parents’ belief that she is wasting her time. Their ignorance runs off her however, and she refuses to yield to the norm for her contemporaries: marrying one of the local men, invariably a woodcutter and settling down to a life of babies, beatings and bathos.

Both of our heroines have clear goals and both seem equally intent. However, somewhere along the line, one of them loses sight of the finish line and her chances of happiness crumble slowly into nothingness. Brigitte knows that she is not as important to Heinz as he is to her. She knows that he looks at other girls, and that the fact that his mother is so opposed to the thought of them being together will also bear against her. She knows what she must do. Brigitte’s plan is to get impregnated by the obnoxious sparky, an event which will force him to marry her. The strange twisted morality of the small town in which they all impels it to be so. And so Brigitte tries and tries, failing many times before she hit’s the bullseye.

Paula on the other hand is distracted from her dream of becoming a dressmaker when she sees the handsome woodcutter Erich. A big stupid forest worker, Erich represents a base and pathetic masculinity. Inarticulate and brutish, Erich is nonetheless strikingly handsome and attractive, not yet destroyed by the hardship of working in the trees. Paula is smitten and gives herself to Erich in an empty hayshed. She gets pregnant and thus begins her decline.

Like Brigitte’s situation, Erich’s mother does not believe Paula to be good enough for her son. His mother sees Erich as having a shot at a better life by using his good looks and marrying a rich woman. The penniless Paula does not fit the bill. Paula, under the spell of unrequited love pursues the object of her devotion and attempts to lure him into taking responsibility for his actions. The imbecilic axe man fails to understand the implications of his actions and dreams only of tight jeans and fast cars. Unfortunately, he lacks wit enough even to pass his driving test and is doomed to dreaming of speed. Eventually Paula manages to get him to marry her and they even have a second child. Her life is without happiness.

Brigitte, on the other hand, embarks on her idyllic life with Heinz. The dream of the electrical goods shop comes true and Brigitte grows plump herself in her happy life.

Paula, not happy with the material state of their lives, finds herself becoming a prostitute to make enough money for the things Erich cannot make enough money to buy. She is discovered by some of Erich’s co-workers and tragic results ensue.

Jelinek tells the story of the contrasting fortunes exceedingly well. She brilliantly depicts a patrician community where the men get drunk and beat their women. The grievances of the men’s bitter lives are taken out on the women’s flesh in one way or another. The women, noble as they are in their subjugation, are, regardless, in turn cruel to one another. It is a savage society where only the hard survive. Within this volatile and harsh environment, the innocence of a young girl’s hopes is easily strangled. The purity soured. It is this extinguishing of the light that Jelinek excels at relaying. If the book could be said to have a main character it would most likely be Paula, for it is her story which is the most complex and tragic. Brigitte is a mere foil, a mirror-life to Paula’s. While Brigitte prods and parries with Heinz, Paula is pierced and pounded by the cruel slings and arrows of her outrageous life.

Written in 1975, the book bears clues of an emergent, increasingly consumerist society. So-called respectability and ownership of material items (including spouses and children, as well as cars, clothes etc.) go hand-in-hand. Brigitte’s dream is constructed piece by piece of material items amalgamated to create a whole of ecstasy. Paula is driven by a desire for increased purchase power, and it leads to her ultimate downfall. A tragic heroine, her tragic weakness is her lust for more. In fact all of the principal characters are driven by a wish for a better life.

Love has a strange presence in this book. It exists but in enigmatic forms. It interchanges with other, practical considerations and doesn’t seem to stay too long anywhere. Anytime it tries to prosper it is beaten down. While Brigitte is cold and calculating from the start, Paula has a lot of love to give and is the most passionate of all the cast. She is certainly the most endowed with humanity. It leads of course to her ruin and Jelinek’s ultimate crushing of her strikes a pessimistic chord, which gives the book it’s bleak beauty perhaps.

Jelinek’s narrative is written in the style of simplified romantic fiction, but with an incisive expressionism and a thudding violence, her words cut to the bone and hit home hard truths about humanity and just how pathetic and awful we can be. With a powerful economy of language, the author creates a fairytale world amongst the mountains and the trees where ogres, witches and beautiful princesses live out the moribund stories of the doomed lives. Poetic and inveigling the narrative voice becomes is by turns gossipy and journalistic as it brings us through itself.

‘Women as Lovers’ says much about men and women and how they interact. Jelinek’s sensitive drawing of the two central psyches makes for bated reading and her supporting characters are sufficiently skillfully created so as to colour in the edges on this almost Boschian garden of delights. An unerring look at how it can be, ’Women as Lovers’ is a slice of life. By turns unpalatable and wince-inducing, it is a story about what women sometimes have to endure, in the name of love and survival. Jelinek is a wonderful commentator and a powerful communicator.

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.