King Rat
Cheque Books Out U Skinny Rats
Here’s what I’ve reading, watching, and listening to this week:
Elfriede Jelinek. The Children of the Dead. Yale UP, 2024
Without a doubt the publishing highlight of 2024, Gitta Honegger’s English translation of Jelinek’s hefty jeremiad The Children of the Dead (Die Kinder de Toten) is a holocaust fantasia. Turns out the scenic forests and mountain ranges of Austria (so beloved of tourists) are built on nothing more than a monstrous burial plot (who’d have thought it?) — And now the Dead will rise. Like her compatriots, Reich, Seidl, and Muehl (let’s forget miserable dwarfish opportunists like Haneke and Nitsch), this is another savage indictment of bourgeois sexually-repressed fascism by Jelinek, the only acceptable living communist, and absolute undisputed harsh mistress of wit and delirious contempt. Dense and remorseless prose, grotesque, fantastical (a ghost story to match Pynchon’s Reaganite nightmare Vineland), and very funny: