Greed
"Do you have the talent to be happy? Then on no account waste it here!" Had these been the opening sentences of this grim and dyspeptic novel, they might have served as fair warning to the reader, or perhaps as a challenge: “Enter this enchanted wood, ye who dare!” But they appear on Page 62.
Joel Agee warns us of the recently released English translation of Elfriede Jelinek's Greed in a review at The New York Times. He goes on
Nothing is farther from Jelinek’s mind than advancing a plot or even just telling a story. Her business is social dissection. Not vivisection, for none of her specimens are alive. To be alive — or to seem so — a person must exhibit at least the appearance of autonomy, and none of Jelinek’s characters have enough consciousness to surprise themselves or the reader in the least.
Jelinek has described herself as a kind of scientist who dispassionately “looks into the petri dish of society.” But her procedure in "Greed" is more like that of a prosecuting attorney in a trial of the indefensible, with effigies standing in for the accused, no judge or jury, no court protocol and of course no counsel for the defense. There is an invited public, which, one has to assume, shares the prosecutor’s resentments. No one else, except perhaps a conscientious reviewer, would sit out her entire presentation.
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