Feature Articles

Elfriede Jelinek Wins the Nobel Prize for Literature: Surprise and Stir
by K.M. Jenks, Customer Service Support, YBP Library Services

Elfriede Jelinek's Nobel Prize for Literature should have been a surprise to no one familiar with her work, which has won other awards, including the Georg Buechner Prize, the Heinrich Boell Prize, and the Franz Kafka Award. The difficulty for English-only readers may be that few of Jelinek's works are in English and some are out of print. Perhaps she is best-known here, until now, as the author of The Piano Teacher, from which Michael Haneke made the movie (same title) that took three prizes at Cannes in 2001. The real surprise this year is that a woman won the award. It's been a while: the last being Wislawa Szymborska in 1996. With Jelinek, the female winners are ten in all. Their average age at the time of the award stands at 59, and most are European. Jelinek is 58 and Austrian, but her deeper commonality with the group is that, like the others, she gives a voice to the misunderstood, the marginalized, the outcast, the persecuted.

Yet Jelinek's selection has caused a stir. The grass-roots response, viewable at those places online where anyone can post a review, includes more than one screed. The complaints don't focus on the tendency of the work to be dark and shocking, or on its unflattering and unsentimental view of human nature, or on the way it ruptures language by ignoring linear development and mimesis. Instead, some folks on this side of the Atlantic seem to resent Jelinek's association with such organizations as the Wiener Group and the Austrian Communist Party. This is unfortunate. The art should be the thing judged, a belief one hopes is shared both by the mighty who hand out the prizes and the less-mighty who ponder them afterward.

The basis for Jelinek's award is "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." Is this true? It is. Other considerations pale.

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