The Piano Teacher - Tapa blanda

In this demented love story the hunter is the hunted, pain is pleasure, and spite and self-contempt seep from every pore. (The Guardian)

Heavily symbolic and bleakly realistic, The Piano Teacher turns its female heroin, Erika Kobut, into an extended metaphor for a doomed society... compelling fiction, ensnaring the reader with the intensity of the author's vision and the bitter irony she uses to present her view of the city... Passionately political under its dense mantle of sexual imagery, the novel shares the dark world view long common to Eastern European literature and now increasingly evident in books from ostensibly more fortunate countries, insistently calling our attention to the discrepancy between the Vienna of our fantasies and the one in which Jelinek lives (Los Angeles Times ?With formidable power, intelligence and skill she draws on the full arsenal of derision. Her dense writing is obsessive almost to the point of being unbearable. It hits you in the guts yet is clinically precise? Le Monde)

A dazzling performance that will make the blood run cold (Walter Abish ?A brilliant, deadly book? Elizabeth Young ?A brilliant, bitter, wonderful portrait of mother and daughter, artist and lover? John Hawkes ?Elfriede Jelinek won this year?s Nobel Prize for Literature. Her novel The Piano Teacher is an astou but Jelinek?s ability to disturb and provoke remains undiminished? Herald)

Some may find Ms Jelinek's ruthlessly unsentimental approach - not to mention her image of Vienna as a bleak city of porno shops, poor immigrants and loveless copulations - too much to take. Her picture of a passive woman who can gain control over her life only by becoming a victim is truly frightening. Less squeamish readers will extract a feminist message: in a society such as this, how else can a woman like Erika behave? (New York Times Book Review)

A haunting tale of morbid voyeurism and masochism, The Piano Teacher is one of the greatest contemporary European novels. Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory by day. But by night she trawls the porn shows of Vienna while her mother, whom she loves and hates in equal measure, waits up for her. Into this emotional pressure-cooker bounds music student and ladies' man, Walter Klemmer. With Walter as her student, Erika spirals out of control, consumed by the ecstacy of self-destruction. First published in 1983, The Piano Teacher is the masterpiece of Elfriede Jelinek, Austria's most famous writer. Directed by Michael Haneke, the film won three major prizes at the Cannes 2000 Festival including best actor for Beno?t Magimel and best actress for Isabelle Huppert.