The contrast with Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho – written seven years later but adapting the same literary archetype – highlights aspects of Jelinke’s critique of the female condition. While the central trope breaks little ground, one senses that Jelinek’s use of a Jekyll/Hyde character may be a deliberate ploy, adapting a male persona to address the contemporary social and sexual expectations and pressures placed on women.

Young Klemmer is drawn ever deeper into the disturbing world of her sexual imagination, forcing both characters to confront the clash between their social personas and primal, repressed desires. In him Kohut’s frenzied and lurid desires find the vent they have for so long lacked.

However, her violent fantasies come to a head when she meets and is seduced by her pupil Walter Klemmer, a dashing young would-be ladies’ man. As in the novels mentioned above, The Piano Teacher plots the course of Kohut’s destructive alter-ego as it spirals out of control.Įrika has until now managed to limit herself to her night-time prowls, wild cat-fights with her mother and clandestine trysts with a razor blade (the scenes involving self-harm are some of the most disturbing in this self-consciously shocking novel). Suffocated by her own high-cultural propriety – as well as her tyrannical mother, with whom she has been engaged in a life-long, love/hate power-struggle – she is secretly consumed by loathing for the complacent, repressed social mores of which she appears to be the epitomy. On the outside the picture of bourgeois respectability, like Humbert Humbert, Erika Kohut’s austere facade conceals a cesspool of rotting monsters. Heard this one before? For anyone who has read, say, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray or American Psycho, the basic outline of this story will be pretty familiar. By night she trawls the seedy porno joints of Vienna, spies on couples having sex in public parks, self-harms and indulges in violent sexual fantasies. A socially repressed ice-queen and failed concert pianist, by day she enforces the rigours of classical technique and enlightens her pupils on the finer points of Schubert, Beethoven and Brahms. Erika Kohut, the main character and eponymous ivory tinkler, is a middle-aged teacher at the Vienna Conservatoire. High art collides head-on with S&M in The Piano Teacher, by 2004 Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek – a Jekyll and Hyde for the age of hardcore pornography.

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek