SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “A Cuckoo Clockwork Orange.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (16 December 1990): 3

In the following review, Eder notes the “black irony and jarring distortion” in Wonderful, Wonderful Times, comparing Jelinek to Austrian author Thomas Bernhard.

Since Wonderful, Wonderful Times is set in the 1950s gloom of postwar Vienna; since everyone in it is crass, corrupt or distorted; and since it ends in a horrible blood bath, the title could justifiably be taken as gallows humor of the crudest kind.

It is, in fact. Jelinek's characters, and the voice she uses to tell of them, are fashioned with black irony and jarring distortion. Yet the ultimate effect is grace, a dark image delivered in terms appropriate to it, but in a draftsmanship that conveys a hint of delicacy and lyricism, as if these had been ejected from the room but continued to haunt it. We think of George...