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George Hoare
posted 27 February 2007

Greed was written in 2000, before Jelinek was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. There is no literary consensus on Jelinek (and perhaps no possibility of one): some have celebrated her Nobel as a triumph for those who want to write (and read) adventurous and difficult prose, others see Greed as the culmination of a series of novels which remain virtually impossible to read except, in the case of Greed itself, as a hysterical monologue which dispenses with dialogue, (and, for the most part) characterisation and plotting, in order to flesh out the thoughts of an inconsistent and undirected narrator.

In this context, it is difficult to be unequivocal on the subject of whether Greed 'works' or not - whether it is readable enough to be a successful and compelling meditation on ageing, avarice and Austria, worthy of a Nobel prize winning author. Greed is undoubtedly a difficult book to sit down and read, with its thick, heavy prose and lack of dialogue or ready painting of characters. The unidentified narrator's focus of attention compulsively shifts from the central observation that humans are greedy - for property in the case of Kurt Janusch, the dissatisfied country policeman; for love and above all sex in that of the lonely women he uses (as Kurt seems to put it 'Your weakness is: you can't be, like me, alone with yourselves') - to obsessive, multi-dimensional descriptions of the objects that populate the story.

And while it is initially compelling and involving to read passages on the different, interrelated aspects of the ecology of a grim man-made alpine lake which 'swallows everything' from the trees around it to, eventually, a young murdered girl, soon the inability of the narrator to move beyond (pages of) obsessive description becomes tiring. While 'meditations' (as Greed is styled in the press release) perhaps ought to go at the pace of the narrator, and the speed at which he or she chooses to associate ideas and concepts and pick up phrases to use, Greed shows little consideration for the reader (a fact which caused some reviewers to slate Greed as virtually incomprehensible and infuriatingly unstructured), or for the structures of the novel that allow communication and, importantly, the telling of a story.

The argument would surely run, though, that by abandoning the traditional constraints of the novel, Jelinek is - as many before her have successfully done - able more closely and accurately to portray her characters and, especially, their motivations and aspirations. Indeed, authorial voice is never identified, and while this does perhaps make it harder to know why and to what extent Jelinek really condemns the unremitting acquisitiveness of Kurt, or the neediness of the women whose property is is able to acquire, it forces us to make those judgements. Throughout, Jelinek displays a memorable turn for the darkly comic phrase, particularly when describing Kurt: he is trustworthy only to the extent that women immediately expose secrets to him lest he leave before they take their clothes off for him; he is expansive in the sense of being (morally?) 'clean and empty'; he is brutal and 'plays according to his own time, which he beats, always into a stranger's flesh, with an industriously rhythmical hand'; finally, he is materialistic and 'overlooks everything that has no value' to him - including, as we find out, the women he sees as houses, with their genitalia as open doors through which to pass in the process of acquisition(!), leaving aside even the erotic, as Kurt lusts after young boys.

The inconsistency of the authorial voice, however - both in terms of switching between characters (quickly - from Kurt's coital considerations of the furnishing of the house, to Gerti's neediness and exaggerated love for and dependence on the man buggering her), and the knowing self-criticism of the writing ('You can complain all you like about boredom, while you're reading this, but please not to me') - means, inevitably, that there can be no sustained criticism of the greed (for property, for love) that drives the characters. Whether or not Jelinek's insights into human relations and our inherent acquisitiveness, regardless of what is being acquired ('since the car driver wants to please the police, one only has to hold out one's hand, and already the notes come flying in one after the other'), compensates for the lack of clarity and honesty of the authorial voice is difficult to say - it is, regrettably, infuriating that the reader is forced to make that judgment.

What there is of a plot concerns Kurt's (perhaps accidental) murder of a young girl, which causes another death - the suicide in Vienna of the betrayed Gerti - leaving Kurt and his greed seemingly to triumph. But the plot is evidently secondary to the descriptive force of the narrator. And above all, Greed is about two things - rather than the characters or what happens to them, it is about thinking about greed and about sex ('a good licking'). Jelinek, the Nobel Prize winner, certainly has a darkly comic view of human nature, and the skill with which to render it vividly. It just seems that sometimes in detaching her voice from herself, she forgets the clarity that structures and drives the most compelling literature. Perhaps she needs to think about what she has to say about Kurt and how his avarice motivates him, and remember what it is about greedy public servants, lonely middle-aged women and southern Austria it is she wants to tell us: 'And in his greed for property he then forgets himself, sometimes quite suddenly, but he never forgets what he wants'.