Jelinek, Le Clezio, Pierre

I read four novels from Elfriede Jelinek since my last post: Women as Lovers, Piano Teacher, Lust and Greed. If found them for the most part hard to read, except for piano teacher. I found that Jelinek certainly describes sex explicitly for serious literature, although it was not offensive. In Women as Lovers and Greed, I found the experiments in structure made it harder to read, although these experiments at least served the content., unlike Pierre's Vernon God Little and Dia'z Wondrous Brief Life of Oscar Wao, which did not. Le Clezio wrote an extraordinary book on hunger as the sensation which defined World War II, both in camps and in occupied countries. La ritournelle de la faim was certainly effective and limpid in its style. I had, of course, Hamsun's Hunger on my mind the whole time, but the overall feel of the book was totally different. I didn't like DBC Pierre's novel. I thought it was contrived, and I can certainly tell there is a fashion for what people think are new voices, but actually are superficial misuses of stream of consciousness and vernacular speech.