08 October 2004	Friday	22 Shaban 1425

VIENNA, Oct 7: Nobel prize winner Elfriede Jelinek shares with other Austrian literary luminaries a love-hate relationship with her country, reflected on Thursday in her warning that the award should not be seen as a "feather in Austria's cap".

Ms Jelinek, 57, who became famous outside the German-speaking world when her Novel, "The Piano Teacher", was made into an acclaimed film, withdrew from public life in 1996 after she was rubbished by the rightwing Freedom Party of Austrian nationalist Joerg Haider as a purveyor of pornographic, low art.

This image of Jelinek stemmed partly from her novel "Lust", published in 1989, where she said she tried to show that sexuality, as lived within the conventional framework of marriage, "is itself a practice of violence, namely of the man against the woman".

Elfriede Jelinek defended the novel's explicit, troubling sex scenes as "anti-pornography" but the right's campaign carried a bitter echo of the Nazis' denunciation of "degenerate art".

On Thursday she welcomed the Nobel prize as "surprising and a great honour," but said that she was too ill to travel to Stockholm for the award ceremony. "I cannot at this time deal with people," she said.

Ignoring her remark on Austria, President Heinz Fischer said from Rome that he "heartily" welcomed the news of her Nobel prize, and said it served as a "tribute to all Austrian literature."

"Her exceptional body of literary work has won the world's highest acclaim in this field," the president, a socialist, said. Despite living as a recluse between Austria and Munich, Jelinek widely comments on society, including on her website, and her trenchant criticism of Austria follows in the tradition of fellow playwrights and authors Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke.

Born in Austria's south eastern Steiermark region in 1946, Jelinek began studying music at the Viennese Conservatory in 1960, graduating 11 years later with excellent marks.

Almost immediately afterwards she began writing successful radio plays and in 1974 both got married and joined the Austrian communist party. In her novel "Women as Lovers", which appeared in 1975, she equates marriage with death and in following works she has continued to explore relations of power between men and women and the conflicts between mothers and daughters.

In "Mothers and Daughters", female offspring are shown as destined to be mere mirror images of their mothers. "The Piano Teacher", published in 1983, is the story of Erika Kohut, a teacher at the Vienna Conservatory whose father, like Jelinek's, died in a psychiatric institution. The abusive relationship with her mother informs Kohut's quest for self-mutilation and sado-masochim which destroys her romance with a young student.

The novel was turned into a film by fellow Austrian Michael Haneke that won the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes film festival in 2001, and exported Jelinek's name beyond Europe.

Jelinek writes as if with a knife, often in short, sharp sentences, and her work reads as relentlessly negative, showing characters trapped in their destinies. "My writings are limited to depicting analytically, but also polemically, the horrors of reality. Redemption is the speciality of other authors, male and female," she said in a recent interview.

"Wonderful, Wonderful Times" published in 1980, tells the story of four nihilistic Austrian youths in the 1950s who commit two brutal muggings for the sake of violence and not theft, and kill a family.

"Children of the Dead", deals with Austria's Nazi past, a theme she dealt with earlier in "Burgtheather". It is the story of Paula Wessely and Karl Hoerbiger, famous Austrian actors who worked for the Nazi cultural machinery, and a denunciation of artists who refuse to take political responsibility.

Written in 1984, it earned Jelinek the wrath of many of her countrymen and left her to remark: "More than ever, I am persona non grata in my own country." -AFP