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...