Dibs

Her book The Piano Teacher features a protagonist who slashes her private parts with a razor blade, urinates in the street when she gets turned on, and begs her young lover to beat the hell out of her. Translated into English from her native German, typical lines from her books include “Erika is baked inside the cake pan of eternity” and “He roasts his hefty sausage in her oven, in its flaky pastry case of hair and skin” and “His articulated penis roars to a standstill in the lay-by of his wife.” She’s Elfriede Jelinek — Austrian Stalinist, feminist, novelist, playwright, and winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature. (She didn’t attend the ceremonies because she said she suffers from social phobia.) Many were shocked by her winning the Nobel: first because her writings tend toward the gross and second because few outside of Austria have ever heard of her. Jelinek’s brand-new work is Bambilandia, which has nothing to do with a cute fawn. It’s an anti-Iraq War Spanish-language theatrical monologue from Destino Publishing in which George W. Bush is called Jesus W. Bush. Aeschylus and Nietzsche are invoked, and an electronic translation leaves a bit to be desired (or does it?), as this excerpt appearing in El País reveals: “Where went to stop all that low-achieving petroleum? It burns. It burns. Explosives around wells where suspended petroleum burns without sense…. To who managed to be saved of the current of the brackish sea, to that one at least we would kill it. Our house can burn, can burn the images with our Gods, but not our petroleum, not our television set, we must conserve it, our altar cannot disappear without leaving track, because it is the track! … Spur attacks against unmanageable boats.”