Elfriede Jelinek, as I mentioned earlier, is the most emotionally naked writer I’ve encountered. She antagonizes her readers with near surrealist exaggerations of female nagging and sexual insecurity. Nicholas Spice in the LRB writes Greed is an “immensely expressive medium that goes to the very edge of coherence, but never beyond it… like the language of Ophelia after she goes mad, or the language of a traumatised child talking to her doll, or an old lady drifting into dementia. The voice speaks to itself, now angry, now facetious, one moment off on some silly pun, the next beside itself with weeping.” Yet, Spice is talking about the German language book. He argues her excellence is lost in translation, “Greed is unreadable. But it is not the same book as Gier.” I haven’t read that one, but enjoyed The Piano Teacher and two of her earlier novels. Know who else loves her? Jamie Stewart from Xiu Xiu. He took the title of “Women as Lovers” for his latest album.
Is Charlotte Roche the lady JG Ballard? The passages I’ve read are quite horrible (this from someone who adores Elfriede Jelinek, even at her most scathing) nevertheless, I’m delighted to see a book described as part Crash, part Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch.
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