The Piano Teacher A Novel Author:Elfriede Jelinek, Joachim Neugroschel In awarding her the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, The Swedish Academy praised Elfriede Jelinek "for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power." In her most well known novel, The Piano Teacher, Jelinek creat... more »es a shocking, angry, aching portrait of a society stubbornly fabricating its own obsolescence, and of a young woman whom this society has slowly fashioned into a ticking bomb. Erika Kohut, piano teacher at the very prestigious, very stuffy Vienna Conservatory, is a quiet woman in her mid thirties devoted to Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, and her domineering mother. The two women's life together is a seamless tissue of desperate boredom, fueled by television movies, neurotic possessiveness, and hopeless dreams of a concert career whose hour has long since passed. Enter Walter Klemmer-handsome, arrogant, athletic, out to conquer the secret of art and Erika's affections with all the rancid bravado of youth-and suddenly the dark and dangerous passions roiling under the piano teacher's subdued exterior explode in a release of sexual perversity and long-buried violence.« less