Incentives - New Literature from Austria

readme.cc provides multilingual access to the latest Austrian literature. In collaboration with the Literaturhaus in Vienna the reading forum offers the latest insights about literature published in Austria.

Literary journalists and researchers introduce current new publications; reading samples allow for a closer look at the texts; short portraits of the authors complement the picture.

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The Project "Incentives" targets at the internationalization of Austrian literature, respectively the translation of current texts.

Project realization: the Office of Documentation of Contemporary Austrian Literature (reviews, author’s portraits) – The Association of Translators (translations) – readme.cc (infrastructure).

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[ Bogtip efter Incentives ] "Neid" is the title of the new novel by Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek. It is a “private novel”, which can only be read on the author’s homepage, and therefore does not participate in the literary market.
Jelinek confronts the lack of work done on coming to terms with Austria’s Nazi past, making a comparison between the tourist industry and the current immigration policy, and casting a critical and ironical eye on the “Austrians’ self-constructed theory of victimization” and its present-day counterpart – victims such as Natascha Kampusch who are celebrated by the media.
One of the victims is also the first-person narrator of the novel. She is the victim of her mother, but also a victim of her critics, and this is treated in an ironical way, making her a perpetrator in her turn. Another victim is the repeatedly announced main character, the violin instructress Brigitte K. Abandoned by her former husband and betrayed by her younger lover, she does away with the latter’s girlfriend. Yet, after all the blood that flows into the Danube in Envy, this murder seems to be a rational, almost insignificant crime, which any reasonable woman in such a situation would commit.
In Jelinek’s Envy, as in the work of Thomas Bernhard, Robert Musil or Marcel Proust, music provides a point of reference in a world that has grown alien. However, in an age of “canned art”, an appreciation of music proves to be not a saving grace, but rather an outdated value and a yet another reason for despair.
Envy is narrative minimalism and maximalist essayism, a socially critical private novel, a ghost train ride into the Austrian past, a genre experiment, reflections on the impossibility of writing, as well as many other things besides.
To put it in one sentence: if Elfriede Jelinek should ever revoke her self-imposed publishing ban and in one hundred years the Süddeutsche were once again to publish a series entitled ‘50 Great Novels of the Century’, Envy would perhaps be among them. However, not all of the 936 pages. Too much envy, it is said, is unhealthy in the end.
Translates by Peter Waugh

Original version: Christine Schranz, September 2008

[ Boginfo ] Jelinek, Elfriede: Neid. (Envy). (original language: Deutsch) Internet download, http://www.elfriedejelinek.com/,