Greed

From the Nobel Prize-winning author ....

Greed is the story of Kurt Janisch, an ambitious but frustrated country policeman, and the lonely women he seduces. It is a thriller set amid the mountains and small towns of southern Austria, where the investigation of a dead girl’s body in a lake leads to the discovery of more than a single crime. In
her signature style, Jelinek chronicles the exploitative nature of relations between men and women, and the cruelties of everyday life.“Elfriede Jelinek is magnificent.” –Mary Gaitskill

“A relentlessly bleak examination of patriarchy, bourgeois values, and violence against women, it is also an elegy for the natural world, polluted by the metaphorical murderer’s indifference to all Others, human and otherwise: this is horror with an uncompromising moral vision.” –Publishers Weekly

“Greed is another intriguing and challenging novel from Europe's cleverest, most visceral social phobic.” –The List

“Jelinek gives us a startling glimpse … of what women are, as well as answering Freud's question, 'What do women want?' It's neither gentle nor sweet nor safe nor reasonable—just true.” –Lucy Ellman, The Guardian

“Sandblasting her characters with a relentless stream of linguistically sophisticated contempt, Jelinek again explores some of her perennial themes, including pervasive loneliness, the ubiquitous ugliness of sexual relationships, and the tragedy of environmental destruction. But she also steps outside of her narrative, implying that textual relationships may also be complicit in the web of exploitation. An original and provocative condemnation of much that other novelists deem sacred, it may also attract Pynchon and Barthelme fans looking for a new challenge.” –Brendan Driscoll, American Library AssociationThe leading Austrian writer of her generation, ELFRIEDE JELINEK received the Heinrich Böll Prize for her contribution to German literature in 1986. The film by Michael Haneke of The Piano Teacher won the three main prizes at Cannes in 2001. In 2004, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She lives in Vienna. In awarding Jelinek the Nobel Prize, the Swedish Academy wrote that the "extraordinary linguistic zeal" of her writing reveals "the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power."