This Paperback Book item from Serpent´s Tail was reviewed on 3-Sep-2008. Search ISBN:1852421835 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. Lust Reference Book. Classifications : General Classics Literature & Fiction Subjects Books Contemporary Literature & Fiction Subjects Books German World Literature Literature & Fiction Subjects Books Paperback Mass Market Trade Binding (b . Click the following link to view the cover of Lust. Related topics: General. Classics. Subjects. Books. Contemporary. Subjects. Books. German. World Literature. Subjects. requestid: 7ae0ef78-0426-4acb-b17d-706f82b1dbc5
requestprocessingtime: 0.0901700000000000
salesrank: 544331
numberofitems: 1
packagedimensions: 8075035480
1) Paperback Book Lust by Serpent´s Tail. I don´t know how anyone can call this book "feminist" since its author unloads a great deal of sneering pity and cold contempt upon its hapless female character Gerti. If anything, this book is a series of repetitive machine gun blasts of misanthropy aimed at modern Western civilization. It is certainly not a feminist analysis of the relationship between the sexes. Jelinek´s writing is casual, filled with puns and wordplay, and deadpan. This book´s accusatory tone and hostile, dissective attitude towards male-female relations reminds me of Marguerite Duras´ The Malady of Death (although the latter is written in second person and this is in third person). Jelinek´s ability to arouse discomfort in the reader is surpassed only by Peter Sotos and Andrea Dworkin, and it´s no coincidence that all three of these writers rip open the still-raw wounds of human sexuality to find the glistening, unfeeling steel of power beneath.
The book should probably not be read all at once.¤ 2) Paperback Book Lust by Serpent´s Tail. I didn´t finish reading it. It was too abstract for me to follow the plot. And the tone is so angry that it´s not even really believable. Maybe it would´ve been believable in the 1960s, perhaps as sort of a companion to The Yellow Wallpaper.¤ 3) Paperback Book Lust by Serpent´s Tail. This relentless stream of brutal sexual gymnastics (´the penal colony of sex´) circles around Man (no name), his sexual object (his wife), their child (´progenitorial profit´) and the wife´s would-be lover.
This principal menu is dressed with cheap anticapitalist rhetoric.
The logical conclusion of this book is the extinction of mankind, preponderantly for sexual reasons, and cardinally because of Man, ´that irreconciliable enemy of her sex´, who considers his wife as a ´jar to p* in´ and sex as ´emptying a dustbag´.
This book is a disgusting rage against mankind, heavy shooting with very serious collateral damage. Everything and everybody is yelled at: her dear fellow Austrians, her native village, Catholic Austria, the Pope (´the immortal souls of the unemployed whose number increaseth year by year as the Pope commandeth´), sports (´Silly Old Sally of an Olympian idea of humanity´), the prolets (´workers eating their wurst and waiting for the worst´), food (´poisonous cheese, rotten dairy products´) with human digestion considered as a sewage system, even the seasons (´cut them down to dirty heaps as does winter the landscape´).
However, the author contradicts herself fundamentally: there is Man, but ´no two human beings are alike´.
The ultimate result of this caricatural SM jeremiade is boring Grand Guignol: ´Nothing but those lights caresses the wretched bodies shamelessly confronting us in all their morning stench and exhaust fumes.´
No wonder that the author concludes: ´What people live on apart from their hope, is a mystery to me. Once the act of purchasing is accomplished, everything is really over.´
But for some, everything is not over: they read E. Jelinek, or better, listen to Mozart.
This book is only for those interested in a life view seen through extremely dark spectacles.
Five stars for the courage of the translator.¤ 4) Paperback Book Lust by Serpent´s Tail. There is a certain kind of uncomfortable silence when someone mentions Elfriede Jelinek, especially in a circle of literary critics, authors and most of all Austrians. Not so much of femme fatale but more like a destructor of modern pre-concepts of society. As it happens, no one likes destructor very much. Of grassy highlands and pictoresque little towns of Austria remained bleak destruction of every cliche out there. There are no "fine" ladies anymore which love theirs husbands and whose husband love them. There are no sweet children playing in the garden obeying their parents, being sweet as kids are supposed to be. Austria form the postcard doesen´t exist. Nor it has ever existed.
In the shapeless cloud that became Austria, there are much to be done yet. One of those things is setting the nature of man-woman relationship in the right place.
What would one happen nowadays? Well one does not get it.
For Jelinek, women is piece of meat, and as meat she has to have its owner. And, naturally it is her husband. To destroy something that exist one has to try living inside it.
There were much talk of kind of language used in this novel. Some of it was aimed towards high pornographical value of it. So it is. But, in a words of Elfriede Jelinek "only man is able to produce pornography". Constant repetitions of sexually explicit (I almost said lyrics) scenes is mere mechanism of their destruciton.
Maybe it is true that this novel lacks a plot or any kind of interesting narrative. And because of it some may find it boring.
But, what remains of highly "engaged" text is great passion "to fix wrongness" in world. And to do that one has to be, in Jelineks own words, banished into the sidelines ("im abseits").
To be read and be thinked upon¤ 5) Paperback Book Lust by Serpent´s Tail. Elfriede Jelenik´s Lust is a bleak, relentlessly dark novel- an explicit description of a woman´s repeated sexual abuse by her husband, a rapacious businessman who regards his wife as a worn-out vessel for his bodily fluids. Home life is affluent but empty - their son is an overweening, irritating little brat (taking after his father). Later on, Gerti begins an affair with another man, whose contemptuous treatment of her simply echoes the sordid treatment of her husband. Finally, she takes her revenge on her husband- the only way she knows how.
This novel has a couple of stylistic oddities. Firstly, there are no characters in this novel. Rather, the work is populated by one-dimensional stooges. The wife, Gerti, is a speechless, passive vessel of exploitation, her husband a senseless brute driven by his bodily urges. If we gave Jelenik the benefit of the doubt, we may call them allegorical- although personally I find them shallow and didactic.
Secondly, there is no direct speech. This gives the book an oppressive atmosphere, which excludes the reader from any attempt to form his own opinion about the characters, as they are effectively dehumanised- robbed of their only means of articulation (and so Gerti´s passive status is only further exacerbated). The effect is rather ruthless and authoritarian, as though Jelenik is forcing her own particular world view down the reader´s throat, stripping the work of any potentially fruitful ambiguity. Further, there is a complete lack of humour in this novel. This is not a trivial criticism- Jelenik peppers her text with dark, witty asides here and there, but, despite being clever and well-written, they come across as simply bitter, empty cynicism.
When this book isn´t recounting poor Gerti being poked and prodded in all sorts of demeaning ways, the author subjects the reader to a kind of vulgar-Marxist diatribe. Gerti´s abuse, and her environmentally despoiled Alpine community are a microcosm of a bleak, empty world of alienation. However, it´s all too relentless for my liking- the novel´s insistent tone, what comes across as a kind of dreary feminist-Marxist tract, brow-beats the reader into submission. Its world view is too narrow, it lacks the breadth and richness of experience we expect from literature. One can´t help but feel doubly disappointed in reading this book- firstly at the novel itself, but more profoundly, at the kind of mindset which could produce such a resigned, desolate world-view.¤ Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 1-Oct-2008, 18524218359781852421830, 620-050-711-351-QUB-5EB-8 
Lust, Book, Image © Serpent´s Tail
|
