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Elfriede Jelinek: Wonderful Times
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Like Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange (1962), Jelinek took the subject of Die Ausgesperrten (1980, Wonderful, Wonderful Times) from the pointless life of young criminals. The story is set in the late 1950s. In the beginning an attorney is beaten up in a park by four teenagers, the protagonists, not for money, but on principle. "And then: Police! But no one's listening. Anna takes this as a reason to kick him in the balls, since she is against the police on principle, as anarchists always are." Jelinek refers critically to Existentialist philosophy: one of the characters reads Albert Camus's famous novel The Stranger (1942), in which violence, killing a man, becomes a way of escape from meaningless to its amoral hero.
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Jelinek is represented in this volume with an essay on translation and is further introduced by an interview. The remaining fifteen contributions by eminent scholars from both Europe and the United States illuminate Jelinek's writings through discussions of her major works. These critical analyses of her prose and drama and their attendant bibliographies make Jelinek's fascinating and highly relevant literary world available to English-speaking readers for the first time.
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In recent years, Jelinek has become more interested in social criticism in general and has attacked the fascist past and anti-semitic trends in Austria and Germany. This has earned her a fair amount of criticism in Austria where she is now seen as a very controversial writer. In 1980, she was quoted as saying "Austria is a criminal nation", referring to her country's participation in the crimes of the Third Reich earning her the wrath of many Austrians. Regardless, Jelinek is seen in Europe as one of the most influential writers of contemporary times.
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