GREED
by Elfriede Jelinek
Reviewed by Simona Sivkoff
Greed is the latest novel available in English by Austrian Nobel Prize-winning writer Elfriede Jelinek. It is particularly uncanny to read it now amidst crashing stock markets, Madoff's crumbled Ponzi scheme, and an unprecedentedly high percentage of insolvent homeowners. Not that Jelinek predicts a global economic collapse; instead she analyses with great precision human shortcomings and foibles. Jelinek scrutinizes several aspects of her home country Austria: its media, its politicians, its people, and its nature. But once the reader looks past the names of people and locals, the book takes on an undeniably universal relevance.
Set in an idyllic Alpine village, Greed follows the exploits of Kurt Janisch, a local policeman - "just the sort we women like" - and a serial killer who murders unmarried woman homeowners and takes over their property. His pursuit is not driven solely by the desire for acquiring property but also by the encouragement of the bank managers who routinely review his mortgage - an obligation that has gradually become insurmountable. Jelinek transforms the idyllic countryside into a nightmare populated by zombified men and women who worship the holy trinity of religion, politics, and money. She relentlessly insults, tortures, and mocks her characters: "Silly cows, women. All of them. Above all, the educated ones." Jelinek is adamant that the status of victim confers no special innocence: she portrays victims usually as living in a deadly symbiotic relationship with their oppressors.
The country policeman considers women to be "unentered rooms, waiting for someone to switch on the light so they don't have to do it themselves anymore." Offering them his affection he translates his sexual appeal into a material gain. Jelinek explores not only avarice but also a wide range of other failures in modern life. She is brazenly sarcastic about myths of beauty, purity of nature, and romantic relationships. The characters are ridiculed for modeling their lives after the shallow narratives they see and read in popular fiction and TV: "Gabi has accumulated a whole collection of eye shadows, mascaras, foundations, and lipsticks. Nowadays it's pure stupidity and ignorance if four-year-olds don't paint their fingernails. But they do it because there's always someone else who has started."
Page after relentless page presents us with a newly angled attack on the wholesome narratives of love. For instance: "Love doesn't pull down barriers, as is often said, it builds them up, so that behind them people learn to wait and are not always pointlessly kicking the iron banister." Jelinek deconstructs platitudes and myths. Her writing offers a bleak and sarcastic vision of reality in which aging women are treated as superfluous refuse and love between men and women is nothing but a degrading act. Kurt Janisch's affair with the widowed piano teacher Gerti, 50, homeowner, is nothing more than a series of brutal sexual encounters. The lonely aging woman is portrayed as a sad, masochistic, masquerading clown, who in a depressing moment devoid of self-delusion commits suicide. Janisch kills his other lover, the sixteen year old Gabi, and gets away with it scot-free.
Jelinek completes the circle of violence with a nod to her predecessor Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina: "It was an accident." The darkness in the world of Greed is thus complete; the crimes, suffering, and violence will go on, there is no hope for the characters. Whatever hope exists in Greed exists outside the novel. Jelinek hopes that by learning to laugh at the darkest parts of ourselves we learn to transcend them.
ELFRIEDE JELINEK
GREED
Translated by Martin Chalmers
Seven Stories Press, 2007
