Austrian feminist wins Nobel

By Michael Ollove
The Baltimore Sun

RUDI BLAHA / AP Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek, photographed yesterday in her Vienna home, is best-known here for her novel "The Piano Teacher."

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BALTIMORE — The Nobel Prize in literature was awarded yesterday to Austrian novelist, poet and playwright Elfriede Jelinek, a feminist writer with an uncompromisingly dark, disturbing and occasionally brutal vision of human nature.

Jelinek, a little-known author in the United States but one of the most celebrated voices in the German language, was lauded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for "her 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."

She is the first woman to win the literature prize since 1996 and only the 10th in the 103-year history of the prize.

"They assured me that I received the prize because they value my work, not because I am a woman," Jelinek told The Associated Press in Vienna, Austria. She will not attend the December ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, she said, because she suffers from "a social phobia."

Although pleased about the prize, Jelinek said she "can't stand" the attention that comes with it. With her phone and doorbell ringing constantly, she said her plans for the coming days were simply "to disappear."

In her fiction, Jelinek, 57, has explored pornography, sadomasochism, persecution and what she regards as the degradation of women at the hands of men. Her work is peopled by characters who are fractured, self-lacerating and pathologic.

Nobel prizes Winners of 2004 Nobel prizes and those to be announced: Monday: Seattleite Linda Buck and Richard Axel won the prize for physiology or medicine for their work in explaining the sense of smell. Tuesday: David Gross, H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczek won the physics prize for revealing how forces in the atomic nucleus keep it from flying apart. Wednesday: Israelis Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko and American Irwin Rose won the chemistry prize for revealing a process that gives doomed proteins a chemical label and then chops them up. Yesterday: Austrian Elfriede Jelinek won the literature prize for what the Swedish Academy called her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays." Today: Peace Monday: Economics

If Jelinek is unyielding as a writer, she has been described as no less so as a person. During the student movement in Europe in the 1970s, she was a member of the Communist Party. She has been a vituperative critic of Austria's lack of candor about its Nazi past (her father, who she has said went mad, was Jewish, her mother Catholic).

She was so incensed in 2000 when the fascist Freedom Party was invited to join Austria's ruling coalition that she refused to let her plays be performed in her country. She took revenge on the Freedom Party's xenophobic, anti-Semitic leader, Joerg Haider, who had called her work "degenerate," by writing "Das Lebewohl" (The Farewell), a monologue satirizing him.

Margarete Lamb-Faffelberger, a fellow Austrian and head of the foreign language and literature department at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, yesterday called Jelinek courageous for refusing to bow to pressures and continuing to "speak for the underdog, and not just women but many segments of society with no voice."

Jelinek's works tend to provoke, and her plays sometimes have been received with hooting and shouting matches.

Her 1998, award-winning "Sports Play" correlated competitive sports with Nazism. Her 1992 novel, "Lust," which Jelinek said portrayed "the violence by the man against the woman" in marriage, outraged many male critics who dismissed her as man-hating. Her best-known work in America, the 1983 novel "The Piano Teacher," is about a deeply unhappy woman who mutilates herself, frequents porno parlors and engages in degrading sex. It was adapted into a 2002 movie.

Her latest play, last year's "Bambiland," is a relentless attack on the U.S. war in Iraq.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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