SOURCE: McRobbie, Angela. “A Universe of Pain.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4570 (2 November 1990): 1183.

In the following review, McRobbie examines the depraved and bleak world portrayed in Wonderful, Wonderful Times.

Elfriede Jelinek's Vienna is a city of sexual squalor. Its post-war population—men, women and children—is taking revenge on its once noble or dignified past. These people bear no resemblance to the voluptuous, sexually satisfied creatures of Klimt's paintings. Nor are they the sexually curious but refined patients who filled Freud's consulting-room. Jelinek's men and women inhabit a universe of pain for which there is no “talking cure”. They are victims so given over to intensifying their suffering, to pursuing their own degradation, that we can feel no sorrow, no sympathy. In The Piano Teacher (published in Britain last year), Erika, the novel's central character, is brought up by a refined but insane mother, her madness masked by respectability...