SOURCE: Innes, Charlotte. “Death in Vienna.” Nation 252, no. 10 (18 March 1991): 346-48.

In the following review, Innes compliments Jelinek's exploration of fascism in Wonderful, Wonderful Times, noting that the novel is “a comedy of the absurd.”

In the summer of 1962, I spent a vacation in Austria with my family. One night, in a small village on the Danube, my father went to a Bierkeller with some friendly locals, who before long were singing Nazi songs and reminiscing about the good old days. I was only 11 years old, but I remember that it really spooked my father, who was not just an English tourist who spoke good German (and whom they oddly assumed to be sympathetic) but a German-Jewish refugee. Clearly, there was more to Austria than beautiful scenery—a suspicion that, thirty years later, is more than confirmed by two remarkable Austrian novels newly translated into English.

Malina by Ingeborg...