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Spending the summer here at my cabin in northern Michigan forces me to relax and accept waiting as an art form. For the last week I have agonized over my running out of available bandwidth, and needing my ATT monthly service to flip over so an additional 30 GB would be available to use for downloading this particular Greed book review podcast I have been wanting to hear. Greed was a very hard book to read and I wanted an intelligent perspective before setting down my own thoughts here. I have been aware of Book Fight for some some time now, but I am a plodder toward new things ever since The Beatles hit town. The popular Book Fight podcast (They won an award!!!) is hosted by writers Mike Ingram and Tom McAllister who both hail from Temple University. And when I finally did hit my iPhone play button the initial cackle amounting to several minutes of nonsense erupted until the two academics abruptly segued to trash Greed and added little good to say about anything they had read or heard about Elfriede Jelinek. And perhaps it was their age (I am sixty-two), but it was also quite obvious that neither men were significantly instructed or sufficiently aware of Austrian history, and therefore lumped pretty much all Austrian writers as haters for what they have seen in travel magazines to be a “beautiful country with pretty mountains�. From the beginning there was an enormous amount of giggling and unrelated nonsense due to their mutual dislike for the novel. There was a severe lack for any real substance they might have been prepared to talk about had they applied more brain cells into their assigned project. Later, after clicking the podcast’s web page “About Us� tab, I was provided biographical details regarding the hosts . They are described as being open to “tangents, misdirection, and general silliness.� I can attest to the authenticity of that statement. I then went on to listen to another podcast and their assessment of Thomas Bernhard’s My Prizes: An Accounting and if I have my druthers I feel pretty swell about not listening to either of these two fellows talk about books ever again.

Greed was without a doubt the meanest and strangest book I have read this year. There may be none other like it. Jelinek does often alienate her readers in order to cull out the lightweights. And similar to Thomas Bernhard she consistently revisits and expounds on her vitriolic spurs and constantly applies them violently. The routine complaint I generally garner from reading all the serious and great contemporary Austrian literature is the embarrassing head-in-the-sand culture that denies their own involvement as sympathizers and puppets of the Nazi regime. Theirs is a terrible secret, and guilty feelings need and want to be assuaged in that country, but in this great social denial this cleansing cannot be completed. Thus the writers� repetition. Same goes for weak women and what they do to get what they want, their shameful sacrifices made for awful men and rues meant to provide them riches and social standing. Physical and sexual abuse that is tolerated and actually condoned because of their personal greed. Jelinek neither hates men nor their penises. She simply shows us our many bad apples, the kind of man who makes us all look bad. Jelinek is an equal hater. If the podcast boys at Book Fight seriously read other Jelinek novels they would know the type of business she runs. I recommend her novel Lust as a great vehicle for witnessing her finest. The fact that Elfriede Jelinek also loves vintage clothes should tell us all enough of what we need to know about her. She simply loves what is good about us, and she honors what is beautiful in our past.