For much of her career, Elfriede Jelinek has been maligned in the press for both her unrelenting critique of Austrian complicity in the Holocaust and her provocative deconstructions of pornography. Despite this, her central role in shaping contemporary literature was finally recognized in 2004 with the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The committee acknowledged Jelinek s groundbreaking work that offers a musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society s cliches and their subjugating power. Although...