A review by jentang
The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

4.25

In a shocking turn of events, I watched Michael Haneke's adaptation of this book before I ever touched a page of it (although, I did only watch the first and second-to-last scene with

Erika pulling out her mother's hair

and

Erika's r@pe

, respectively). I would cite the emphasis on the tangibility of the three characters' humanity as the main difference between the movie and this book. In the movie, I got the impression that Erika was thoroughly resolute and stone-cold, while Klemmer was so much more ingrained in normalcy, a boy - not a man - so afflicted by his infatuation with his so nearly unattainable teacher that he cracked and did the unthinkable to have her. On paper, the roles seem to have been reversed. Jelinek reveals Klemmer's sinister internal workings, his crude and uncaring predatory gaze. Erika, on the other hand, fully sinks over the course of the novel into the role of child inflicted upon her by her mother for all of her life, one that she had only ever temporarily escaped from whenever she was instructing pupils like Klemmer. As soon as her barricaded heart is touched by another unwavering source of psychotic attention, the only thing she knows as love, a repressed side of her comes out, sexual on a surface level but driven heavily by her desperate need for the rest of her person that her mother had kept under lock and key for so long that Klemmer was fighting to reach (or so she believed). Her mother is so much more deranged than even the movie lets on, seeing her daughter as entirely a commodity even in the most troubling of times when you would think some semblance of a true motherly instinct would appear. In this book, Erika's sealed away heart is actually bared, leaving her as the least unfathomable character. For any reader following any normal moral code, this is a challenging book to get through; this is the case for reasons more trivial than its disturbing plot, even. Its level of induced captivation waxes and wanes. The writing has a tendency to drawl and repeat itself. Nevertheless, when things get going, I find the conveyance at certain times to be quite impressive. (One of the most stand-out parts of the story for me was when Klemmer read Erika's letter. There, a literary cacophony took place. It was overwhelming, perturbing, and ensnaring all at once.) All in all, I don't believe I've ever read anything like this before, and while I think I'll be just fine without reading anything like this again for quite some time, this book is utterly something else.