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A tough book to review. Let me start with the author, the winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize for Literature. You can go to the wiki page for her and read the controversies. One member of the Swedish academy resigned in protest when she won the award. Wiki also gives pro and con comments ranging from some saying she writes brilliant stuff to others saying she has a masochistic view of women and it’s degrading to them and her work is basically pornography. (The book I am reviewing, the only one of hers I have read, has some graphic sex but I don’t consider it pornography by any means. And there is some masochistic sex but it’s initiated by the man and disliked by the woman.) I note also that my GR friends who have written reviews of this book run the gamut from 2’s to 5’s. Some think it’s great; some think it’s crap.



Another interesting thing, while I was reading the book, I thought the style reminded me a lot of a book I read by another German author, Crossing the Sierra Gredos by Peter Handke. He was the 2019 Nobel Prize winner. He also was a controversial choice due to his politics (again you can see all that on Wiki). Imagine my surprise when I see that Jelinek said when she won the prize that it should have gone to Handke! She also caused controversy by not attending the ceremony when she won the prize but she sent a video acceptance speech � she’s agoraphobic.

On to the story: I’ll use the book blurb so I don’t give much away (Not that there is much more to the plot than what is here): “Greed is the story of Kurt Janisch, an ambitious but frustrated country policeman, and the lonely women he seduces. It is a thriller set amid the mountains and small towns of southern Austria, where the investigation of a dead girl's body in a lake leads to the discovery of more than a single crime. In her signature style, Jelinek chronicles the exploitative nature of relations between men and women, and the cruelties of everyday life.�

The country policeman is obsessed with two things: sex and real estate. He’s in debt and he courts older women to get them to sign their houses over to him with an annuity type of deal so they can continue to live in it but the house will become his when they die. We only get details about the latest older woman he has seduced, but apparently she is the third. He takes advantage of his police role, hitting on women when he stops them for a traffic violation or when they are involved in a traffic accident � he can see all their personal details on their driving license. By the way, he’s married with an adult son following in his footsteps. His son, also married, is waiting for his wife’s mother to die so his son and his wife can get the house.



The masochistic part of this, I think what the author has been criticized for, is the self-abasing attitude of the women who accede to the advances of the policeman. He’s tall, blond, blue-eyed. They are older, losing their good looks, and desperate for company to fight off loneliness.

They fall hard for him and imagine that they love him and that he loves them. Yet in lucid moments they know he is just after their house; he never kisses them, he never really talks with them, he treats them like crap, but he is all they have. And yet they can’t wait for him to show up � or maybe he doesn’t show up. And all acknowledge this degradation to be the case: the policeman, certainly, the women, and the narrator; the last perhaps the harshest of all in their assessment of “well that’s the way these women are.� It’s the narrator’s assessment, I think, that got this author in trouble with the critics. Had she left it to the policeman and the woman to think these things, it might be a different story.

How low can these women go? Imagine an older woman letting the policeman bring an underage girl into her home for the policeman to have sex with while she is there. That’s the girl who was killed and whose body was found in the lake. Do we have a suspect here? By the way, some blurbs describe this as a “thriller� � it’s not. The killing of the young girl is peripheral to the main story. And, while we follow some of the police procedures in their investigation, it’s definitely not a police procedural or a detective story.

The author inserts herself into the narrative. Some examples:

“Now I’ve lost the thread myself, the first set goes to you. You can have it, if you like.�

“Why do I always see the negative, I am admonished. I don’t know either.�

“All right, all right, I will stop, but not yet.�

[re: the policeman] “I hope I’ll manage it so that you too experience one of his happy moments! But I doubt it, I already don’t like him.�

[When she talks about the relatives of the missing girl:] “All the rest are dead now, I decide, and so I save myself a lot of work�.So I no longer have to describe them. Thank you very much.�

An example of what the older woman, in love with the policeman, thinks:

“My love, you can nail a mirror to the wall over there, if you like, in the middle of the furniture, which you will additionally choose with premeditation. [The policeman talks the women into renovating their houses the way he wants them.] But please don’t go! You can nail the whole house to yourself, but please don’t go! I would otherwise have to prepare myself to become lonely.�

And here’s the narrator: “There’s already a woman who’s involved in the accident, she owns her home, and she is likewise free, even if not in sexual matters. A freedom, however, which she doesn’t appreciate, she would much rather be in the custody of a man and not be responsible for it.�


Some passages that I thought represented good writing:

[on reality TV shows:] “…where people pour out their being and then don’t want to wipe it up afterwards.�

“My opinion is, it would have been better if God had put in some overtime and created something better.�

“Stealing isn’t easy, often it’s hard work, otherwise we’d all be doing it.�

[of a killer:] "…he shot his cousin, girlfriend and her mommy full in the face with a pump-action gun, but they didn’t need their faces after that anyway."

[of the policeman:] “He is what he is, no, he lacks something. He completely lacks a whole dimension, that is, the dimension that there are other people apart from himself. It’s as if you knew what time it is, but not which year, which month, which day, these are units, which even if distasteful, have our lifeterms in their hands.�

I’ll give you an example of the writing style, if you sign up to read this. This passage is when the policeman brings the underage girl into the home of the older woman:

“I don’t know, there’s something different about the girl this time, the country policeman is still thinking, as her blissful gaze at him is suddenly as if extinguished. So. Yet another veil over her pupils. Finished. The man’s peace of mind is gone. Now he has thrown the older woman, in whom he places some hopes, out of her own living room, just because of the girl. She had become quite unbearable with her constant demands for more, without even knowing everything she’s got. She doesn’t even have all her wits about her, one is always missing�.She even gives the man orders, because she’s waited so long for it. She has a right. He’ll take that from her. He has a method for that. He’s already dreading it. He knows: As soon as he opens his shop, she’s already running in, and he’s the one who supposed to be directing the traffic. He hardly has time to start his engine, and she’s already trying to throttle it. He thinks, she wants nothing else except to feel number one in his books. Can’t she hear her expiration date, even if she can’t read it? Doesn’t she hear, on the other side of the door, the moaning of an adolescent still under sweet sixteen? Well, that’s a different tune isn’t it? As fresh as a folk song, as resolute as the federal anthem, but one doesn’t know the words. All the notes the older woman has mastered, the man knew long ago. Because he reads them from her red, sweating, enraptured, blissful face, which she puts on when she sees him. And the tune she strikes up underneath him is false, he thinks it is even deliberately faked. It is a strange whimpering, which begins to turn into an almost practiced groaning, hardly has he touched her.�

We get very detailed, scientific descriptions of the lake, the mountains, the decay of the dead girl’s body. By detailed, I mean 8 or 10 pages and it’s a bit much in each case.

Nobel Prize material? I’ll give it a 4. Note that it is rated 3.4 on GR, which is pretty low.

Photo of the author from dw.com
The Styria region of Austria, the setting for the book, near Graz from winemag.com
An Austrian policeman from shutterstock.com