Viewers of the devastating film The Piano Teacher , based on Elfriede Jelinek's autobiographical novel, should consider themselves forewarned about the sadomasochistic tenor of this divisive Austrian writer's books. No exception, Greed (2000) is the author's first novel translated into English since her controversial and unexpected Nobel Prize in 2004.

At Greed's center is a strapping country policeman, Kurt Janisch (a closeted homosexual); his desperate, aging mistress Gerti, whom he openly loathes; and his second mistress, the 16-year-old Gabi, whom Kurt kills during sex and crudely discards in a local lake. Greed culminates in Gerti's suicide after she signs away her house to Kurt. The plot is merely a foundation for Jelinek's poly-vocal stream-of-consciousness ranting, as she alternates the characters' cliché-laced thoughts with her own scathing indictments.

A former communist and a committed feminist, Jelinek despises Austria's vestigial patriarchy, largely unaffected by two major wars and here embodied in the sadistic, sex-obsessed Kurt (named, perhaps, for recent Austrian president Kurt Josef Waldheim, whose falsified account of his actions in WWII didn't ruin his political career). Nor can Jelinek endure Gerti's slavish desperation for such a monster. In 300-odd pages, Jelinek disfigures the traditional narrative, yielding up a bleak self-portrait of a long-neglected avant-gardist working in a country whose tortured history remains so repressed that not even decades of agitated vitriol can penetrate its core of shame.

An aggressive affront to the arch-bourgeois conventions of the novel, Jelinek's writing is not without precedent. Although she considers herself a provincial novelist working in the tradition of unflinching Austrian writers such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, and Robert Musil, Jelinek's resolute anti-Enlightenment views echo the self-excoriating performances of Vienna Actionist Hermann Nitsch, Antonin Artaud's reality-penetrating Theatre of Cruelty (Jelinek also writes plays), and the aurally oppressive performances of contemporary British noise band Whitehouse — artists who've extended their contempt for the world to their chosen mediums. While initial resistance to Jelinek's uncompromising novel is inevitable, the revulsion inspired by Greed should mature in time into an appreciation of Jelinek's extreme tactics, which are justified by her demand that the world be radically different, and better, than it is now.

-H.G. Masters