WHEN AUSTRIAN WRITER Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, she responded - true to her dim view of humanity - with gloom. After hearing she'd been nominated, Jelinek told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper, she desperately hoped the Swedish Academy would prefer fellow Austrian novelist Peter Handke. 'I prayed that he wouldn't die or get sick,' she said. There was no question in Jelinek's mind that she was chosen over Handke because she was a woman.
Today, Jelinek recoils from those remarks. In a rare interview to mark the English-language publication of Greed, published in German in 2000, the agoraphobic novelist says she merely feared the fishbowl of a laureate's life. 'Of course, I'm very happy and proud to have received it,' she says. 'My problem is that, because of my anxiety disorder, publicity is close to torture.' Her phobia barred her from attending the ceremony - she delivered her acceptance speech by telecast.
A renegade anti-patriot in her homeland, Jelinek came to international attention in 2001, through Michael Haneke's screen version of her 1983 novel, The Piano Teacher. Her novels and plays attack the fascism latent within Austria's proud celebrations of high culture, natural beauty and folk traditions. 'Cruelty, the lack of consideration of the strong for the weak, and the master-servant relationship, in the Hegelian sense - these are my themes,' she says.
Reviled by the right, Jelinek polarises the left. She specialises in satirical critiques of patriarchy, yet her masochistic heroines are the antithesis of feminist role models. She was a member of the Austrian Communist party from 1974 to 1991, but her sarcastic portrayals of the working class are far from empathetic. Despite her trenchant criticism of the objectification of women, she loves fashion, especially Yves Saint Laurent.
Jelinek's shrill anti-capitalism and feminism mean her novels are often dismissed as sermons. In 2004, The Weekly Standard accused the Swedish Academy of 'destroying literary standards' by selecting an 'unknown, undistinguished, leftist fanatic' whose works 'verge on gross pornography'. The Nobel citation applauded Jelinek's 'musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power'.
Jelinek's experimental prose plays with scenes from popular culture, lampooning the electronic media, fashion magazines, pulp fiction, pornography, political slogans, press releases and tourist brochures. 'For me, reality appears more clearly in cliches than in the most subtle psychological description,' she says. 'The balance of power in society is wrapped up in them.'
