Greed by Elfriede Jelinek

Greed

Elfriede Jelinek

Not so much a stream of consciousness as a stream of disquiet. It's dark, confusing and disturbing, yet strangely hypnotic. No matter how closely you read it it tells you very little, but leaves you with a sense of so much more.

Extract
While driving, women make mistakes out of carelessness, absent-mindedness or incompetence, and already the country policeman has them by the skirt and doesn't let go again, if they're to his taste and he has got hold of their address. How quickly they consent and more as soon as he has unpacked them. It was the handy packaging, with the thread, pull here, which opens even the most buttoned-up. He stirs up a fire in them. The bodies can be thrown away, the heads one would keep, so that one can make sure that they don't talk incessantly, the women. They're real gold mines.
Parallels
  • The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek
  • Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas
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Violence
Explicit sexual content

Bad luck and trouble