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 many honors, including the Heinrich Böll Prize for her contribution to German literature and the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Translated from German by Gitta Honegger
In Screeds, the adamantine, acerbic wit that won Jelinek the Nobel Prize is on full display. On the Royal Road, written three weeks after Trump’s first election, is “a screed of outrage at the political, economic, and cultural forces that have brought us to an unprecedented—and for many, unimaginable—moment of crisis for modern democracy. Mr. Trump is never mentioned by name, but the narration sketches an undisciplined, uncouth monarch who has been propped up by obscene wealth, a nonstop media circus, and a remarkable talent for self-aggrandizing” (The New York Times). Endsieg: The Second Coming was written in the immediate aftermath of Trump's once inconceivable second term and opens with the setting of a scene: “Piggy as Polyhymnia, Kermit also as somebody, behind them an alpine wayside shrine.” And although he remains nameless, there’s no mistaking him: “He is old, but all others he still can beat, hole in one!” And Epstein, Epstein, nobody knows where I have been—the final and newest text, written this year with wildfire intensity—move away from The White House, but just barely... Donald, Donald, Jeffrey. Duck, duck, goose!
Suffering no fools, and especially not our Fool in Chief, Screeds will singe off your eyebrows.
Elfriede Jelinek is magnificent.
Jelinek's work is brave, adventurous, witty, antagonistic and devastatingly right about the sorriness of human existence, and her contempt is expressed with surprising chirpiness: it's a wild ride.
Her musical flow of voices and counter-voices that, with extraordinary linguistic zeal, reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power.
