Becca Rothfeld

Becca Rothfeldis the non-fiction book critic for the Washington Post. Her essay col­lect­ion, All Things Are Too Small, came out last year.

Signs Reduced to Noise: On Elfriede Jelinek

Becca Rothfeld, 23 January 2025

Elfriede Jelinek’s​ eleven novels and more than twenty plays have few plausible characters and even fewer parsable plots. When she was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2004, the committee praised ‘her musical flow of voices and counter-voices’, which ‘reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power’. This is a polite way of saying...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences