The Piano Teacher

　　三十八歲的艾莉卡是知名的鋼琴老師，單身，與具有高度支配欲的母親同居。在中產階級知識份子的表象生活下，艾莉卡卻唯有在偷窺他人做愛、自殘身體的儀式中，才能得到滿足。漂亮年輕的男學生愛上她，兩人展開一場互相爭奪支配權的SM激愛旅程。對於情慾的壓抑變形描繪絲絲入扣，作者亦在訪談中直言，包含母女關係的高壓與張力在內，這本文壇其實毀譽參半，卻在出版後獲得諾貝爾文學獎高度肯定的小說，是貼近她自身生命的寫作。

　　The most popular work from provocative Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher is a searing portrait of a woman bound between a repressive society and her darkest desires. Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the prestigious and formal Vienna Conservatory, who still lives with her domineering and possessive mother. Her life appears boring, but Erika, a quiet thirty-eight-year-old, secretly visits Turkish peep shows at night and watched sadomasochistic films. Meanwhile, a handsome, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old student has become enamored with Erika and sets out to seduce her. She resists him at first—but then the dark passions roiling under the piano teacher’s subdued exterior explode in a release of perversity, violence, and degradation.

　　Reviews

　　In this demented love story the hunter is the hunted, pain is pleasure, and spite and self-contempt seep from every pore. (Guardian)

　　As a portrait of repressed female sexuality and a damaged psyche, The Piano Teacher glitters dangerously (Observer)

　　Some may find Ms Jelinek's ruthlessly unsentimental approach - not to mention her image of Vienna as a bleak city of porno shops, poor immigrants and loveless copulations - too much to take. Her picture of a passive woman who can gain control over her life only by becoming a victim is truly frightening. Less squeamish readers will extract a feminist message: in a society such as this, how else can a woman like Erika behave? (New York Times Book Review)

　　Heavily symbolic and bleakly realistic, The Piano Teacher turns its female heroine, Erika Kobut, into an extended metaphor for a doomed society... Passionately political under its dense mantle of sexual imagery, the novel shares the dark world view long common to Eastern European literature and now increasingly evident in books from ostensibly more fortunate countries, insistently calling our attention to the discrepancy between the Vienna of our fantasies and the one in which Jelinek lives (Los Angeles Times)

　　Teaching piano daily at the Vienna Conservatory is all that remains of Erika Knout's once promising career. Lately, however, her love for her star student, Walter Klemmer, is disrupting both her well-ordered professional life and her emotionally rigorous world at home with Mother. This neurotic love triangle, in which violence is confused with love, evolves toward inevitable breakdown as Erika finally defies Mother and, through Klemmer, excites chaotic passions. With her facility for metaphor and stylish narrative, Austrian Jelinek bears comparison to Schmidt and Boll at their best. Hers is a powerful debut in English; with five other novels awaiting translation, she should develop a large audience among serious readers. (Paul E. Hutchison, Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. )

　　A brilliant, deadly book (Elizabeth Young)

　　A dazzling performance that will make the blood run cold (Walter Abish)

　　The Piano Teacher is an astounding book (Sunday Herald)

　　There are some horrifically crazed laughs to be had at the antics of mother and daughter trapped in their domestic hell (Irish Times)

　　Jelinek's expressionistic language indulges with lethal intensity (Metro)

　　Jelinek's fragmented style blurs reality and imagination, creating a harsh, expressionistic picture of sexuality (Scotland on Sunday)

　　A brilliant, bitter, wonderful portrait of mother and daughter, artist and lover (John Hawkes)

　　A startling novel... eloquent, intelligent and deeply unsettling; the polar opposite of pornography. (Arifa Akbar Independent 2010-10-29)

　　Terrifyingly powerful (Hermione Hoby Observer 2010-11-28)
 

作者簡介

艾芙烈．葉利尼克(Elfriede Jelinek)

　　於一九四六年出生於奧地利，在首都維也納長大，並進入著名的「音樂學院」(Music Conservatory)就讀。她被譽為同一輩奧地利作家中的翹楚，著有《女情人們》(Die Liebhaberinnen)及《情慾》(Lust)等小說，另有劇本、散文等著作。一九八六年她因對德語文學的貢獻，榮獲海里希．波爾(Heinrich Boll)文學獎；一九九八年榮獲著名的德國畢希納獎(Georg Buchner)，以表彰她的創作成就；2004年榮獲諾貝爾文學獎。

　　Elfriede Jelinek was born in Austria in 1946 and grew up in Vienna where she attended the famous Music Conservatory. The leading Austrian writer of her generation, she has been awarded the Heinrich Böll Prize for her contribution to German literature. The film of The Piano Teacher by Michael Haneke won the three main prizes at Cannes in 2001. In 2004, Elfriede Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.