Why read The Piano Teacher?

Book cover of The Piano Teacher

Book description

One of Elena Ferrante's Top 40 Best Books by Women

Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory by day. By night she trawls the city's porn shows while her mother, whom she loves and hates in equal measure, waits up for her. Into this emotional pressure-cooker bounds music student…

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Literary fiction

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Piano Teacher as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Núria Añó

Author

Elfriede Jelinek has many anti-heroines in novels and plays, but I pick Erika Kohut, a repressed Austrian piano teacher who in her late thirties is still living under the power of her stifling elderly mother. Vienna, the city of music and great composers like Franz Schubert, is seen not only through the Vienna Conservatory but inside peep-shops that Erika frequently visits to escape from her mother. Although she is a masochist and self-mutilates, she begins a relationship with Walter, a new student, and gives him the instructions through an atypical letter. Jelinek's work makes me feel many things, not only…

From Núria's list on The best books by European authors with female anti-heroes characters through time.