The piano teacher book jelinek5/30/2023 ![]() ![]() I’m drawn to the book stylistically, for scenes such as the unforgettable one where she lists, for pages, the things she wants Walter to do to her, each thing worse than the last. But I know there’s more to The Piano Teacher than that. Maybe enjoying painful books is satisfying in the same way as watching a horror film, a kind of voyeuristic compulsion. We are voyeurs to Erika the way she is a voyeur, both in the sense that she’s into hiding in car parks to watch people having sex, and the sense that she is acutely watching life passing by her, an intense frustration and self-loathing coming from this that permeates everything. I love it even though sometimes it almost physically hurts to read, and for me there’s a double element to this – the pain of the story, and the pain of the prose too, which is precise and weaponised, a narration a step removed from the protagonist Erika that coolly documents her life and her actions. Maybe after 2016 I’m done with sentimentality, though, and it’s hard to think of a less sentimental book than The Piano Teacher, objectively a masterpiece, subjectively a book that changed my life and that I always return to. When I thought about what books mean the most to me I thought I would probably pick one that revealed some kind of essential humanity, a book that reminds me of what it’s like to love and live etc etc, something with redemption at its heart. ![]()
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