In its Oct. 13 edition, L’Osservatore Romano focused in particular on the novel «The Pianist,» which was made into a film.
«Three hundred pages of brutal recklessness, perverse psychologies and destructive feminine genealogy, intended only to denounce the irremediable inheritance of evil, sin, violence in every form of love,» was how L’Osservatore Romano summed up the novel.
The newspaper criticized Jelinek’s works because «her topics are quickly channeled into descriptions of the feminine world, between scenes of crude sexuality, which are not conducive to an understanding of the emancipation of woman.» It assailed the work for «linking sex to pathology, power and violence.»
«Cold and sad, marked by lack of communication and abuse, the union of bodies is never open to delicacy or dignity of soul or purpose,» the article said.
L’Osservatore Romano also attacked the work’s «devastating lasciviousness in the name of political and social denunciation translatable in absolute nihilism.»
Daughter of a Jewish father and Czech mother, Elfriede Jelinek was born Oct. 20, 1946, in Murzzuschlag, in Austria. She had an eclectic formation in which music predominated.
