The Piano Teacher

Books

From the Nobel Prize-winning Austrian author: a "brilliant, uncompromising" novel that "gets behind the cream-puff prettiness of Vienna" (Publishers Weekly). In The Piano Teacher, Elfride Jelinek creates a shocking portrait of a talented, capable woman fashioned by society into a ticking bomb. Set in 1980s Vienna, it describes a culture rotting under the weight of its oppressive, outmoded ideals-a place mirrored by the heroine's own repressed dreams. Erika Kohut, piano teacher at the prestigious Vienna Conservatory, is a quiet woman devoted to Bach, Beethoven, and her domineering mother. Her life consists of desperate boredom, neurotic possessiveness, and hopeless dreams of a concert career whose hour has long passed. Enter Walter Klemmer-a handsome, arrogant man out to conquer Erika's affections. Suddenly the dangerous passions roiling under her subdued exterior explode in a release of sexual perversity and long-buried violence. Awarded the Nobel and the Heinrich Boll Prize for her outstanding ...