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.'

Greed follows a sadistic country policeman, Kurt Janisch, who treats sex as an instrument for accumulating property. Janisch embarks on an extra-marital affair with the middle-aged narrator, Gerti, and forces her to surrender her villa as a trade-off for his affections. Gerti's plight parodies the popular view of romance. As Jelinek writes in Greed: 'Love doesn't pull down barriers, as is often said, it builds them up, so that behind them people learn to wait and are not always pointlessly kicking the iron bannisters.'

Her characters are agents of ideology, more caricatures than personalities, she says. 'The characters are marionettes of their social conditions. For me, the psychology of a character is deduced retrospectively - that is, from their involvement in the plot, not the other way around.'

Greed inverts the storybook picture of an alpine paradise. Ecologists are ridiculed as 'jolly comedians'.

'The beauty of Austria - under which the corpses of the Nazi-period are buried - has covered up much of its history,' says Jelinek. Her 1980 novel, Wonderful, Wonderful Times, traces the transmission of Nazism to the children of perpetrators, as four disaffected adolescents commit random violence in the late 1950s. 'In post-war Germany, the crimes were worked through, letter by letter,' says Jelinek. 'But in Austria, because we wanted to be viewed positively by the Allies, we needed to deny our complicity with the Nazis and portray ourselves as 'little innocents'. One mustn't forget that Hitler learnt his anti-Semitism from trashy magazines in Austria and was exported to Germany as a complete political mind. Anti-Semitism was once our great export, so to speak.'

Jelinek's critique of Austria's historical blindness makes her the bete noire of conservative pundits. When The Piano Teacher was first published, Die Welt likened her writing to spit, thundering: 'She hates music, she hates Vienna, she hates people. And above all, she hates herself.'

The Piano Teacher remains her most powerful work because Jelinek reins in her avant-garde excesses and allows her characters a measure of psychological realism. The novel autobiographically explores the disturbed sexuality of Erika, a 36-year-old pianist, who has lived alone with her cruelly authoritarian mother since her father was put in an asylum when she was a child.

Also an only child, Jelinek was born in 1946, when her mother was 43. Her father was a Jew who saved himself by working for the Nazis as a chemist. He went mad while she was still at school, dying in an asylum in 1969. 'He was certainly not made to be a father to a small child,' says Jelinek. Her mother was a paranoid psychotic, who forbade her daughter from leaving the house to play, or have friends. She imposed a strenuous daily programme of piano, composition and ballet, convinced that her daughter was a genius. Any form of pleasure was prohibited.

'My mother was extremely neurotic - a terrorist of normality,' says Jelinek. 'I have had the strange fate of having two crazy parents, but seeing as the whole world is crazy, maybe this is normal. People are, without exception, neurotic. I cannot cope with people and therefore avoid them. This is certainly a result of my extremely unhappy childhood.'

Jelinek turned to writing at the age of 18, after she suffered a mental breakdown that derailed her university studies in art history and theatre. After a year recuperating at home, she earned a diploma as an organist from the Vienna Conservatory, and fell in with the so-called Vienna Group of surrealist poets. 'I then pursued these techniques into the realm of realism and tried to combine them,' she says. 'I work with phonetics - with the sounds of language. The disadvantage of this is that it's difficult to translate my work.'

When she was 28, she married film composer Gottfried Hungsberg. Jelinek and her husband maintained a long-distance marriage: she visited him in Munich, while continuing to live with her mother in Vienna. The arrangement continued until her mother's death in 2000. She now splits her time between both cities. 'My mother was completely mad, though not demented - she was very intelligent until her end,' she says. 'I couldn't leave her in this state. It was mere blank horror. Still today, unfortunately, I feel culpable. I'm happy every day that she is finally dead, otherwise I surely would be.'

Jelinek's treatment of her characters is so pitiless that it might seem to mimic the tyranny of her mother. Yet she insists that she's not parodying the suffering of her characters, but rather the ideologies that reduce them to play things. 'I see myself as a kind of scientist, who looks in the Petri dish of society without enthusiasm and without anger,' she says. 'You can always see more if you look at the bigger picture, despite a seeming lack of sympathy. But if you read between the lines, you can see much enthusiasm, anger and confusion.'

Jelinek says she's drawn to write about murder because, through violent death, 'the brutality of society hisses out in a surge, as though it were the vent of a pressure-cooker'. She attributes what she regards as the superiority of female crime writers - Dorothy L. Sayers, Ruth Rendell and P.D. James - to their subordinate status. 'The underdog, which in a patriarchal society is the woman, must study power in order to overcome it, as the slaves did in Rome. This is why women write such good crime novels - they know the mechanisms of power.'

Greed is billed as a thriller, despite its bare-bones plot and absence of tension. The murderous Janisch resembles the far-right politician Jorg Haider. During the 1999 National Council elections, Haider launched a poster campaign against 'degenerate' artists, with billboards posing the question: 'Do you want Jelinek or do you want Art?'

From 2000 to 2002, when Haider's Freedom party was a partner in the governing coalition, Jelinek protested against the country's far-right lurch by prohibiting the performance of her plays in state theatres. 'When the atrocity of the formation of the government occurred, I tried despairingly to do something,' she says. 'Of all countries, it was Austria that was the first to reinstall an extreme right-wing government post-war.'

She had supported the Communist party, as a counterweight to Austria's right-wing consensus. 'In genuine socialist countries, I would certainly have been a member of the opposition. Unfortunately, I never really believed in the history- making power of the working class.'

She was upset by the Austrian reception for Greed. 'I don't understand why so much hate is brought against me,' she says. 'I don't mean negative reviews, which are of course acceptable, but contemptuous and hate-filled writings, which have destroyed me personally.'

Winning the Nobel Prize may not have made her less vulnerable, but she says it has diminished her sexual status. 'A man can increase his erotic value through success, regardless of whether he is 30 or 80,' she says. 'A woman is erotically devalued by achievement, because she becomes intimidating. She is forever chained to her biological being.'

WRITER'S NOTES

Genre Literary fiction

Latest book Greed (Serpent's Tail, HK$240)

Lives Vienna and Munich

Age 60

Family Husband Gottfried Hungsberg, composer

Other works in translation Women as Lovers (1975), Wonderful, Wonderful Times (1980), The Piano Teacher (1983) and Lust (1989).

Other jobs Playwright. Wrote libretto for the 2003 opera adaptation of David Lynch's film Lost Highway.

Awards Heinrich Boll Prize (1986), Georg Buchner Prize (1998), Nobel Prize for Literature (2004), Franz Kafka Prize (2004).

What the papers say '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 ... What it amounts to is a dismantling of the novel before our eyes.' - The Guardian