SOURCE: Morin, Carole. “Dreamed of Depths.” New Statesman and Society 2, no. 60 (28 July 1989): 33-4.

In the following review, Morin praises The Piano Teacher as a “dramatic” and “seriously comic” work of fiction.

Good books, like haircuts, should fill you with awe, change your life, or make you long for another. Elfriede Jelinek's The Piano Teacher manages to fulfil at least two of these demands in a reckless recital that is difficult to read and difficult to stop reading. The racy, relentless, consuming style is a metaphor for passion: impossible to ignore.

Of course, thwarted passion and unrequited love have been themes of fiction for centuries but the repressed piano teacher, Erika, and her “averagely handsome, averagely talented” pupil, Klemmer, reach dreamed of depths of mutual humiliation and dashed hopes.

These dashed hopes are expected, longed for, engineered and dreaded by Erika from the first signs of desire in her...