The Piano Teacher

Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory, is thirty six years old, and still shares a bed with her mother, who has run every part of her daughter's life since childhood, choosing her clothes, controlling her money and driving her relentlessly toward a performing career that never fully happened. Erika has no lock on her own bedroom door and no real privacy from a mother who treats independence itself as a betrayal, and Elfriede Jelinek shows what that lifelong control has produced: a woman who watches pornography alone in booths and cuts herself in secret, her desires diverted into places her mother's supervision cannot reach.

Walter Klemmer, an athletic engineering student and one of Erika's pupils, pursues her with a persistence that reads at first like ordinary infatuation, and after an encounter between them in a school bathroom, Erika responds by writing him a long letter spelling out exactly how she wants to be treated, restrained, struck, degraded according to instructions she has worked out in careful detail. Klemmer is repulsed at first and pulls away, but he later returns to her apartment while her mother is shut out of the room, and what happens between them there follows his own violent terms rather than the letter's, leaving Erika beaten and assaulted rather than answered on her own request.

Erika goes to find Klemmer afterward carrying a kitchen knife, finds him already involved with another woman, and turns the knife on herself instead, a single wound to the shoulder rather than anywhere fatal, then walks home alone. Jelinek writes the whole book in a cold, deliberately unpleasant style that never asks a reader for sympathy, and it suits someone who wants fiction willing to examine cruelty, control and desire without softening any of it into something easier to like.