In this demented love story the hunter is the hunted, pain is pleasure, and spite and self-contempt seep from every pore. - Guardian

As a portrait of repressed female sexuality and a damaged psyche, <i>The Piano Teacher </i>glitters dangerously - Observer

Some may find Ms Jelinek's ruthlessly unsentimental approach - not to mention her image of Vienna as a bleak city of porno shops, poor immigrants and loveless copulations - too much to take. Her picture of a passive woman who can gain control over her life only by becoming a victim is truly frightening. Less squeamish readers will extract a feminist message: in a society such as this, how else can a woman like Erika behave? - New York Times Book Review

Heavily symbolic and bleakly realistic, <i>The Piano Teacher</i> turns its female heroine, Erika Kobut, into an extended metaphor for a doomed society... Passionately political under its dense mantle of sexual imagery, the novel shares the dark world view long common to Eastern European literature and now increasingly evident in books from ostensibly more fortunate countries, insistently calling our attention to the discrepancy between the Vienna of our fantasies and the one in which Jelinek lives - Los Angeles Times

A brilliant, deadly book -- Elizabeth Young

 

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