Wonderful, Wonderful Times

Rating:
Summary: This book appeals to heavy thinkers and dark souls
Review: Also, if you are interested in the lives of atypical teenagers. THere were parts of this book that were too, too violent. The style is very intense, objectified, and the author keeps her distance from the grotesque actions and words of her subjects. If you were riveted by A Clockwork Orange, you will like this book.

Rating:
Summary: Powerful but to What Purpose?
Review: This book came to me with recommendations from a good friend whose opinions I value. Its author, Elfriede Jelinek, has won a Nobel Prize for literature. There is no question but that the book is powerfully written even in translation. Nonetheless, I had trouble understanding what it had to say. It is not, as some of its reviewers have suggested, a book about postwar Austria. Its teenage protagonists are much angrier, much emptier, and much sillier than most of their contemporaries. Their parents are angry, empty, silly, and poisoned by something like history too but Herr Witkowski, a mass murderer and veteran of the SS is not representative of Austria in general. Neither is his pathetic doormat of a wife. Sophie's empty mother, the heir to a fortune made on the backs of slave labor in the family steel works, is not representative either. Sophie's contemporaries do not mug people in the park. Neither do they set off bombs in their schools or take sadistic voyeuristic pleasure from their class power. Most Austrian kids do not go about murdering their kith and kin.

What then is the book about? I take it Jellinek is exploring the dark side of her imagination and, of course, that may be a useful thing for her to do. I don't know, however, why I need to go along on that exploration. In the end the book felt awfully like a freak show. Even as child being taken to the circus I knew that there was something unseemly about those shows - the antithesis of the beautiful grace of the trapeeze. I turn out to still think so.