Greed Book

Of the ten previously unread Nobel recipients I had marked down to read this year, something told me to either get Elfriede Jelinek out the way first, or, leave until last so at least if things didn't go so well, the winners that went before made up for it. Well, although I wouldn't class this as a complete train wreak, there is little in the way of positives I can take from my collision course with Jelinek's meandering, tiresome, and weird prose, resulting in one of the most frustrating novels I have ever read. Frustrating because there is a story in there somewhere, through a dense fog, but she mostly puts the reader in a situation of being left on the sidelines, never to stand in the middle of her pitch.

I am lead to believe Elfriede Jelinek has always had a love/hate relationship with her native Austria, and that becomes apparent as the novel moves slowly through some menacing and lighter passages of writing that you feel were written with Jelinek having a laugh in the dark. I can also confirm that with Greed, she has an unhealthy obsession with genitals, with the male form being unfairly used as an aggressive weapon. She was described to me recently as writing from 'somewhere else'. That I can concur with, but being different doesn't always result in a decent book. This is a daredevil, risk-taking novel that may have a minority praising her bold and unflinching look at country life in the mountains and small towns of Austria.

Greed is written with a uniquely sneering tone, and a tireless fury for civilisation. Jelinek has seized the conventional novel by its dirty shoelaces, turned it upside down, continuously shaking and pulling, so that the reader feels nausea settling in. She can be explicit and extremely hostile when in comes to the sex included, and writes with a full-on sordidness for us humans. But there is also a chirpiness throughout the novel, where maybe things are not suppose to be taken that seriously. Some have even called her a comic writer, I wouldn't go as far as that here.

To break it down as simply as possible, there is a cop, Kurt Janisch, married, who mostly goes by the name of 'the Country Policeman', who likes to play around with the woman of his town, until a body turns up in a lake leading to a murder investigation. But all this is kept to a minimum, and Greed is in no way to be classed as a crime/mystery/thriller, if anything it's a dark sexual satire. Jelinek has no interest in plot development, instead, the novel's main function is to flesh it out with the divisions between men and women. They are on completely different wavelengths, the women are in love with the country policeman, whereas he blatantly only does what he does with property in mind. There are other aspects of greed, with that of banks, businesses, and phone companies 'hot for our voices', and also the church.

The Country Policeman was at no point a likeable character, his greed surpasses all. He has his problems financially, and prostitutes himself to every woman in the vicinity and beyond, in the hope that they will hand over their houses to him, or at least leave him something in their wills. He thinks of female genitalia in the same way, 'all these doors permanently flung open for him'. Jelinek circles round him like a wild cat, disgustedly observing his small strengths and big weaknesses. He completely lacks any sort of moral standard. What surprised me, was Jelinek is equally scathing about women, and their repellent eagerness to be loved or screwed. She doesn't exactly paint a pretty picture of her fellow Austrians, and her language used for anything sexual was like a piece of pornography done in bad taste. In fact, there were times when you feel she is trying to break away from the novel just to write some filth.

Brave, adventurous, witty, and antagonistic it may be, but ultimately this is a novel that doesn't really go anywhere. If there were answers, or a deeper meaning to her prose, I just wasn't attached enough to the novel to break it down and dissect it's internal parts. It's also well over a hundred pages too long. I could have bailed out early, and nothing would have been missed.