Women As Lovers

This book is hateful, frustrating, and fairly extraordinary. The STYLE of it is extraordinary, drawing itself into a corner like engravings on brightwork and just when you think the space is full it manages to fit in another curlicue. Jelinek shows great, deep, if awful, understanding of a lot of

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abiding things we try to ignore in our love-relationships because there's just no bearing up under it really - especially we of the working classes, if that's indeed what I am - but the funny thing is that you feel like the writer - and I take the writer and narrator to be fairly close, because this is a polemic - unites the protagonists, Brigitte and Paula, in herself, and that writing the book must have been a process of destroying Paula's dreamy impulse toward compassion, which destroys Paula after all, and relying on Brigitte's sustaining hate. Maybe it just hits me strong because I'm in "this BEAUTIFUL land" Austria right now and realizing how much harder the hate and food and scheiss-glut and piggy satisfaction hits when it's not Japanese uyoku but something approaching your own people - but you can't do that. If you are soft or cold and constitutionally or by long pain inclined to a certain bleak view of things, you have to have a light hand, or it diminishes you. You have to give the good some due, or it makes good and bad both seem a little like a joke. Kicking pregnant women around is just not that widespread a sport among men, even in rural Austria, and the insistence damages this story. I feel like in a better version of "Women as Lovers" the Susi character could have carried some hope, but here it's all poisoned by the hatefulness of sex and all people and I just like Susi because I'm a man.

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