Jelinek Elfriede. The Piano Teacher

The most popular work from provocative Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher is a searing portrait of a woman bound between a repressive society and her darkest desires. Erika Kohut is a piano teacher at the prestigious and formal Vienna Conservatory, who still lives with her domineering and possessive mother. Her life appears boring, but Erika, a quiet thirty-eight-year-old, secretly visits Turkish peep shows at night and watched sadomasochistic films. Meanwhile, a handsome, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old student has become enamored with Erika and sets out to seduce her. She resists him at first — but then the dark passions roiling under the piano teacher’s subdued exterior explode in a release of perversity, violence, and degradation.
Originally published in German as Die Klavierspielerin by Rowholt Verlag, Reinbek.
First published in English by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, New York, 1988.
This reissued edition is published by special arrangement with Serpent’s Tail, London.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 88-010782.
eBook ISBN13: 978-0-8021-9883-9.
Grove Press.
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway.
New York, NY 10003.
Distributed by Publishers Group West.
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