Some books are so virtuous it hurts. Elfriede Jelinek is a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and has impeccable politics. ‘Greed’, though, is a distinctly joyless novel – the tale of how a small-town policeman seduces women and destroys them, often to obtain their land, but equally often for its own sake. Anyone looking for psychological insight into the processes whereby men destroy women is not going to find it here; for Jelinek, women who are vulnerable are weak, and there are male predators out there who will find and kill them, and that is all there is to it. Kurt Janisch is so typical a destroyer that much of the time Jelinek only refers to him as ‘the country policeman’ – this is a novel about types rather than characters.
Because it is so much about types, the use of what at first sight seems to be stream-of-consciousness to tell how Janisch seduces and blights a dim young girl and a cleverer middle-aged woman incomer is paradoxical. We are not given privileged insights into the minds of individuals so much as constructions of how a particular sort of person thinks – constructions that regularly sidetrack themselves into editorials.
‘Greed’ tells us, rather than shows us, a devastatingly bleak view, which some will admire but others will consider hopelessly removed from what they look for in a novel.
