Lust

Gerti and Hermann

Hermann is the director of a paper factory in rural Austria — a small potentate in a small domain. He has a wife, Gerti, and a son, and a position of local importance, and he uses all of them as extensions of his own will. The novel opens with him returning home and taking Gerti with a violence that is described not with outrage but with the flat, mechanical language of ownership. He does not see her. He has never needed to.

Gerti is not quite a character in the conventional sense — Jelinek refuses her the interior life that would allow the reader to identify with her in the comfortable way. She is, instead, a surface on which male power writes itself, and then a woman who attempts one act of self-determination: a brief affair with a university student named Michael, who skis through the forest and represents, briefly, the possibility of being seen rather than used. The possibility is false. Michael is young and thoughtless and his interest in Gerti is its own form of consumption. Jelinek does not offer an alternative to Hermann — she offers only a variant.

The Austrian provincial setting is essential. Jelinek grew up in Styria and has written about the Austrian countryside as a place where Nazism was not an aberration but an expression of structures that were already there — the hierarchies of church and factory and gender that made the extreme possible. Lust is not a novel about one bad marriage. It is a novel about the environment that produces such marriages as a matter of course, and that provides the language — religious, romantic, economic — to make them seem natural. What Jelinek refuses, above everything else, is the consolation of romance. There is no love here to corrupt. There is only power, exercised without apology.

The Pornography of Power

Jelinek’s central formal gambit in Lust is to write about Gerti’s sexual experience using the language that pornography uses — the objectifying, instrumental, repetitive vocabulary of the male gaze — but directed against the men who produce it. By describing what happens to Gerti with the same flat, consumptive language that pornography uses to describe women, Jelinek makes the reader feel the experience from the outside: this is what it is like to be the object of this language, not its subject.

The prose style is therefore not a failure of artistry but its highest expression. The sentences are deliberately ugly. They do not invite the reader in. They repeat the same gestures with minor variations, as the acts they describe are repeated. The language refuses beauty because beauty would be a form of collusion — would aestheticize what should instead be exposed. This connects Jelinek to Andrea Dworkin’s theoretical project: Dworkin argued in Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981) that pornography does not represent fantasy but ideology, the literal encoding of the belief that women exist to be used. Jelinek’s novel performs this argument at the sentence level, making it impossible to read without feeling what Dworkin described.

The effect is genuinely difficult. Many readers — including feminist readers — have found Lust unreadable not despite its intentions but because of them. The novel asks you to sit inside a language of dehumanization for 224 pages without the relief of ironic distance or authorial warmth. Whether this is a virtue or a flaw depends on what you believe literature is for. Jelinek believes it is for making you feel what you would otherwise be able to look away from. Lust does not let you look away.

The Nobel Context and Jelinek’s Reputation

The 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded to Jelinek, was among the most controversial in the prize’s recent history. A member of the Swedish Academy, Knut Ahnlund, resigned in protest, calling her work a “mass of text” that was “not literature” and describing the award as a catastrophe for the prize’s reputation. Jelinek did not attend the ceremony in Stockholm — she cited social anxiety and a discomfort with public appearances, though the hostile atmosphere hardly invited a triumphant arrival.

The controversy was not surprising. Jelinek had been a deliberately antagonistic presence in Austrian literary culture for decades — Communist Party member, fierce critic of Austrian nationalism and its refusal to reckon with the Nazi period, and author of novels and plays that made no effort to be liked. The Piano Teacher (1983), which became the more widely read of her novels after Michael Haneke’s 2001 film adaptation, is brutal but allows its protagonist Erika Kohut a form of terrible interiority. Lust (1989 in German, 1992 in English translation by Michael Hulse) removes even that: it is the cold, polished surface on which Jelinek’s argument appears without the mediation of character sympathy.

Within Jelinek’s work, Lust represents the furthest point of a formal strategy that her plays push even further — the near-total elimination of individual psychology in favor of language that exposes ideological structure. It is not where a reader should begin. The Piano Teacher remains the right entry point. But readers who have made their way through that novel and want to understand what Jelinek was doing at her most uncompromising will find Lust an essential, if genuinely punishing, book.

Our rating: 3.8/5 — Jelinek’s most deliberately difficult novel: a work whose formal repellence is its argument, and whose feminist ambition is beyond question even for readers who find the experience of reading it close to intolerable. Not a starting point, but for the right reader, essential.