A SHOCK FOR THIS TIGER MOM

The story about a piano teacher with an obsessive mother begins hilariously and ends on a morbid note and it made me realize how parents cross the line more often than we wish to admit.

The Piano Teacher by Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek. Translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel. Published by Grove Press, New York, in 1988.

I know the love of a mother for her child is pure, unbridled and unconditional as nothing else in the world but what happens when the mother’s love has become curdled by her own warped sense of power and perfection? The Piano Teacher by Nobel Laureate Elfriede Jelinek is brilliant and engaging because most mothers (and fathers) will recognize a part of themselves in this piano teacher’s mother.

Mother nags away at friends and relatives (of whom there are very few, for she broke with them long ago; she wanted to keep Erika safe from their influence). Mother tells all these people that Erika is a genius. She says she keeps realizing it more and more clearly. Erika is truly a keyboard genius, but she has not been properly discovered as yet. Otherwise, she would have long since soared over the mountains, like a comet. Compared with that, the birth of Jesus was chickenshit.

Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Conservatory in Vienna. Now in her early forties, Erika still lives at home under the hawk eyes and velcro grip of her mother, whose suffocating influence Erika escapes only by visiting porn cinemas and peepshows and cutting herself up and drawing blood. Her predilection for morbid voyeurism and masochistic self-mutilation is challenged one day when one of her students, a handsome young man with an intellect to match his musicality decides to seduce her.

At the Brandenburg in Berln. Photo courtesy: Sujatha Suresh

The Piano Teacher was made into a film in the year 2002 and while the reviews talk about how difficult it was to watch this erotic film, I’d like to speak for the imaginative prose and the unexpected turns of phrase in this dark novel. Jelinek plays with language in a way that I have almost never seen and the use of imagery and metaphor is almost as warped as the sexuality depicted in the story. The tale is riveting and, in some passages, unpalatable. Yet it’s the sort of work that’s hard to tear oneself away from because in its manner of writing it conveys, from page one, the very nature—and origin—of obsession, insecurity, angst and depravity.

A fair if vindictive rivalry develops between mother and daughter, for the child soon realizes that she has outgrown her mother with regard to music. The daughter is the mother’s idol, and Mother demands only a tiny tribute: Erika’s life. Mother wants to utilize the child’s life herself.

What begins as a pleasurable fantasy on the young student’s part devolves into an ugly reality that drives home the import of this book. Mothers and teachers have the power to mold a mind. Might they nurture and nourish? Or will they hinder and let the spirit perish? By the time this story barrels to the end, no one can be the same anymore, least of all, the reader. All we know is that there’s a reason for everything and we must circle back, way, way back, to the beginning, to what was said and done—by the mother to the child and by the teacher to the student.

The knife is placed back in the handbag. A gap yawns in Erika’s shoulder; tender tissue has divided unresistingly. The steel has entered and Erika exits. She places a hand on the wound. No one follows her. Many people come toward her, forking around her like water around a dead ship’s hull. None of the terrible pains, expected at any second, begin. A car window blazes.

Erika’s back, where the zipper is partly open, is warmed. Her back is warmed by the ever more powerful sun. Erika walks and walks. Her back warms up in the sun. Blood oozes out of her. People look up from the shoulder to the face. Some turn around. Not all. Erika knows the direction she has to take. She heads home, gradually quickening her step.

At Humboldt University in Berlin where books were burned. On May 10, 1933, Nazi students from the Wilhelm Humboldt University (now Humboldt-Universität) burned over 20,000 books at the university's Old Library and in the middle of what was then Kaiser-Franz-Josef-Platz, now Bebelplatz in Berlin. Photo credit: Sujatha Suresh

One of the gripes I had with The Piano Teacher is the extent to which it digresses right when something is about to happen. I realized that the author was employing tactics to slow down and hold off the suspense before dropping us down the precipice; still, many times over, the work felt somewhat contrived especially at critical points in the narrative.

This could have been a far more potent book. I’m reminded of Eva Baltasar’s Boulder where, too, we begin to see a similar warping and killing of the soul. Where Boulder manages to drive a knife under the ribs as we screech to the halt of the tale, The Piano Teacher feels memorable for another reason, that the story itself could have been tighter and shorter.

By the bridge at Museum Island, Berlin. Photo credit: Sujatha Suresh.