Greed

Kurt Janisch is an ambitious but frustrated country policeman who gets talking to a lot of people in the line of duty, particularly to women: lonely, middle-aged women with a bit of extra property. . . . Things go from bad to worse, for Kurt Janisch and the women who fall for him. Someone sees and knows too much, and soon there’s a body in a lake and a murderer to be caught.

A thriller set amid the mountains and small towns of southern Austria, Greed is Elfriede Jelinek’s most important novel since The Piano Teacher. In her inimitable way, Jelinek touches on the ecological costs of affluence, the inescapable burden of language, the exploitative nature of relations between men and women, the impossibility of life without relationships. A meditative reflection on aging, Greed is another chapter in Jelinek’s chronicling of her love-hate relationship with her native Austria.

Elfriede Jelinek was born in Austria in 1946 and grew up in Vienna, where she attended the famous Music Conservatory. The leading Austrian writer of her generation, she has been awarded the Heinrich Boll Prize for her contribution to German literature. The film of The Piano Teacher by Michael Haneke won the three main prizes at Cannes in 2001. In 2004, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.