The satirical-critical, Eastern European-Jewish strand in Austrian literature represented by Joseph Roth, Karl Kraus, Elias Canetti, and Ödön von Horváth persists in the work of Elfriede Jelinek. With those authors she shares mixed ethnic and cultural roots, a profound respect for language, and a commitment to using language to expose abuses of power. Because of the nontraditional aesthetic method she employs--her refusal to project herself into her characters' minds and her portrayal of the destructive impact of individualism on popular culture--her work remains the subject of intense controversy in the German-language press and is only gradually finding acceptance within the academic literary establishment.

Born in the Styrian town of Mürzzuschlag on 20 October 1946, Elfriede Jelinek grew up in Vienna. She was the late-born only child of a Rumanian-German, Catholic mother and a Czechoslovakian-Jewish father. Her mother, Olga Ilona Buchner Jelinek, a forceful...