Rating: 
Summary: Pretentious, stilted and melodramatic
Review: Although there are interesting issues brought up in this book, (among them, a suffocatingly intimate mother-daughter relationship) the writing is so insufferably stilted that I could barely read the book. The story centers around a piano teacher in her late thirties (often melodramatically described as "decaying" and "old") who lives with her controlling mother. She mutilates herself whenever she feels sad and lonely. A virile young student with conventional ideas of romance falls in love with the her. However, the teacher's concept of love is of the S&M variety. The handsome student misunderstands her intentions towards him and interprets them as rejection. His wounded pride eventually leads him to beat her up and rape her, breaking her nose and rib. The teacher walks around in a short dress afterwards, carrying around a knife to mutilate herself further. This book tries too hard to be disturbing and the results are over-the-top and irritating.
Rating: 
Summary: Devastating
Review: Chamber music and sado-masochism: not your usual mix, but they represent the inner and outer lives of a tormented woman. Holy moly, what a story, as well written as it is shocking, as mesmerizing as it is terrible.
Erika, a child musical prodigy, is now in her late thirties, a teacher at the Vienna Conservatory, a teacher as strick and rigid with her students as she is with herself. She lives very unhappily with her elderly mother who has given her all to assure her daughter's success. Erika has a room of her own in the small apartment they share, a room in which she hides the secret yearnings of her stifled life. But mother and daughter share a bed - definitely a weird dynamic going on here, and it gets weirder. In return for her lifetime of sacrifice, the mother expects loyalty and devotion; Erika wants only to escape - but she's powerless to know how to do it - except by the excesses of her sado-masochistic desires. It's when she enlists the complicity of a young male student, Walter Klemmer, that things begin to veer into the truly disturbed corners of Erika's brain, cracking the fragile shell of a life thoroughly dedicated to control and perfection.
Yowie!
Rating:
Summary: Wonderful book turned into cheap trash
Review: Erika Kohut is an aging, failed concert pianist who has taken up teaching at a conservatory in Vienna. Life revolves around the music of Schubert, Bach, Mozart and her all encompassing mother. The book offers an unflinchingly stark glimpse into the deep, dark, cloistered recesses of Erika's mind which is distorted and suffocated by her omniscient mother. Erika's relationship with her student Walter Klemmer, which has one of the most complex, harrowing dynamics I have read in recent times, forms the main plot of the novel. The writing is absolutely brilliant and Jelinek is undoubtedly an extremely talented author. Some of the metaphors she employs are quite simply spine tingling and the book itself is a literary harvest. The master/slave , predator/ prey power-plays are explored with startling candidness and Jelinek completely eschews mollifying euphemisms whatsoever. Erika is a tormented soul imprisoned in her own deviant sexuality and the author forces every reader to confront or atleast contemplate upon the latent(or maybe not so latent!) complexities within him/her.
Whatever I have said so far holds good for the first 200 pages of the book. After that you can take the book by its spine, throw it in to a pile of garbage and then set it on fire. What follows after that is nothing but simply pornography - and not even the good kind at that!It felt like watching a perverse fetish movie from an adult video store. While I understand that sexual complexity is what makes Erika so intriguing in the first place, Jelinek has shamelessly resorted to mere titillation in the later sections of the book. She goes completely overboard with her sado-masochistic melodrama and I just felt my stomach turning. There is absolutely no redemption for this book which could have been a masterpiece.
It feels sad in a way - because I really loved the first half of the book, but I hated the second half even more. Elfriede Jelinek was so close to producing one of the most well- written novels I have had the pleasure of reading and that too with such an interesting character. But she completely ruined it by leaving me with such a bad taste in the mouth that I never want to read her again. It all seems like such a waste.
Nobel-worthiness is not something I am qualified to comment upon. But I have a sneaking suspicion that there are equally or even more talented authors out there dwelling on more socially relevant subjects.
Read the Piano-Teacher only if you want to get completely psychologically disturbed and then throw up in your sink.
Rating: 
Summary: Few books take you to a place such as this
Review: Few books will take you to a place you can't even imagine. McCrae's BARK OF THE DOGWOOD comes to mind as does Martels' LIFE OF PI. These are books, like THE PIANO TEACHER, that create worlds beyond the every day trial and tribulations that most of us face. Elfriede Jelnek's novel about a concert pianist seems innocent enough on the surface (consider the title), but once into the story, it becomes apparent that this will be no easy journey. But isn't that why we read, look at movies, and listen to music? To travel to a different place without actually have to endure the problems and trials ourselves? I think so. Don't be put off by the graphic descriptions of this book. Yes, it does have its moments, but the violence and sexual nature of some of the scenes are not put there strictly for shock value. Rather, they work as a whole. If you're searching for something to read that is unlike anything else, stop: you've just found it. I would also recommend another book by this author, titled LUST, and the book THE BARK OF THE DOGWOOD.
Rating:
Summary: Film Version
Review: For those interested, this book was made into a film a few years back with the same title by Austrian director Michael Haneke.
Rating:
Summary: Twisted Minds
Review: I was first exposed to The Piano Teacher by way of film, which is excellent, but it left some lingering questions about the psychological mindframe of the leading characters. The book offers a very twisted glimpse into the minds of Erika, her Mother and Walter Klemmer, and does so with incredible dexterity. If anything, I was impressed by the fluidity of the text, of the author's ability to integrate all three voices into one and still sound impartial with every character. Her language might bore some people as it is filled with curious metaphors and details, but she has an amazing ability to go on many tangents from something very trivial to something quite absurd. This book is very psychologically disturbing. There is a constant power struggle within the Mother-daughter-intruder triangle and the roles are constantly switching off, with the rarest of outcomes. Sexual roles are also misplaced, with the woman the violent and rapeful while the man is cast into the submissive and traditional type. If you could look past the violence and insanity of this book, you would find it highly enjoyable and thought provoking.
Rating:
Summary: Tremendous let down!
Review: I've been reading Nobel Prize winners for 20+ years. This is the only author that I can honestly refute as deserving of the award. A waste of time and effort.
Rating:
Summary: Congratulations for the Nobel prize!
Review: If you are conservative, I do not recommend the book, otherwise very much. Yes, it contains some phornographic details. And?
The book helps very much to understand people you meet every day. Erika, the piano teacher, has an extremely problematic relation to her mother. Some examples: Although Erika is not a joung woman, the mother expects her to be at home in time, they sleep in a same bed -Erika grows up without a father, etc. I have never seen a better description of such a situation. You get a very good insight of the motivations behind the everyday acts and the developement of Erika's voyeurism. Erika, then, finds herself in a love relation with her young student. She can in this affaire live out her sexual phantasies, but none of them is prepared for the things comming, the sadistic phantasies of her also break out, but somehow you feel sorry for her.
It is difficult to summarize the many observations of the author. Read without preoccupations, it's worth to do! Congratulations for the Nobel prize!
Rating: 
Summary: Pulp fiction at its dubious best
Review: Imagine a young man lusting after his piano teacher, an older female professor of music at a famous university who lives with her domineering mother. He pursues; she resists; he persists; she presents a list of kinky demands that, coupled with a bout of merciless sexual teasing, cause him to plan and then to execute an escape. First, however, he feels compelled to punish her physically for not yielding immediately to his importunate demands, and so he beats her to the point of breaking her nose and even a rib. In a puritanical society such as ours that considers the baring of an actress' breast on television sufficiently obscene to warrant a hefty fine from governmental regulators, a careful reader of this catalogue of conventional perversions, fetishes, and cruelties may be tempted to discard it as pornography until he recalls that it has just been awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature. Puzzled, seeking some redemptive merit, such a reader may find it in the work's painstaking character development, in its rich store of anecdotes about classical composers, and in its lavish use of metaphors, elegantly translated from German by a skilled bilinguist whose own surname rendered in English is Newpenny. As the distinguished eighteenth-century lexicographer, Dr. Samuel Johnson, once wrote of a contemporary novelist's works, if you were to read Richardson [read Jelinek] for plot, you'd hang yourself. Ultimately, the reader is left to wonder about the judgment and mental acuity of those who surprisingly elevated this work from well-deserved obscurity twenty-one years after it was first published in German.
Rating:
Summary: Challenging your senses
Review: The intressting thing about this book is not the story, it's the way she makes us experience it, the way it challenges and tests our senses and convictions. Fiction that makes you nervous, dizzy and leave you in a stage of total uncertainty about your feelings towards what you read. It's a journey through issues one normally rather not think or talk about.
I encourage everyone who is willing to put prejudice and tabooes aside to take a journey into Jelinek's wonderful writing.
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