ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK A new play from Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek that deals with the 2015 terror attack on the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris.
In Greek mythology, it is Hera who blinds the hero Heracles, so that, in a fit of fury, he kills his own family. In the twenty-first century, the gods have another name. So did the three young men who stormed a magazine’s editorial office and a Jewish supermarket in Paris in January 2015 and murdered twelve people. The blind fury, however, remained and more virulent than ever, not least because the weapons were so much more effective.
In this raging text, arguably one of her darkest, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek investigates topical political events in the context of enduring history and myths. Fury expresses itself not only multi-voiced and from the changing perspective of Islamist terrorists (and their special hatred of Jews), in the shape of furious German citizens, individual narcissistic humiliation, or brutal distribution battles around the globe. Rather, fury also appears as the motor that has driven people with a devastating force for centuries.
With her characteristic linguistic power, Jelinek articulates her own disconcertedness in the face of these crimes. In passing, she returns repeatedly to the contradiction between religious laws against representation and the deluge of images online, where movies of assassination, severed heads, and other atrocities are exhibited for millions to see. Fury is a compact grand epic that starts in primal times and attempts to describe the indescribable, relating the inexplicable in our times.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Elfriede Jelinek is a leading member of postwar Austria’s first generation of artists. She is the author of several novels and plays, including On the Royal Road, published by Seagull Books. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004. Gitta Honegger has translated several works by Jelinek, as well as plays by Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Franz Xaver Kroetz and Marieluise Fleißer, among others.
REVIEWS
Praise for Charges (The Supplicants):
'Jelinek has brilliantly adopted the medium of the ancient Greek poets in order to enlighten us about those who have been exiled from their homes and cannot return safely.'—World Literature Today
Praise for Rechnitz and The Merchant's Contract:
'In this new publication, the well-experienced Honegger is clearly up to the task, embracing Jelinek’s encouragement to imitate her linguistic ingenuity when word-for-word translations are out of the question—which is almost always. . . . Still, no amount of translation, either on stage or on the page, can fully remove the texts’ hermetic character. In fact, the successful adaptations of Jelinek’s work tend to acknowledge and even delight in its perplexity. DJ-worthy mixes and mash-ups of premade material, the originals are themselves born through an act of translation that continually calls into question the existence of a definitive Urtext. And as both Stemann’s staging and Honegger’s translation demonstrate, this arduousness by no means rules out entertainment. Toiling through three hundred pages of her impenetrable prose is arguably worthwhile if only to be dazzled by her rhetorical savvy, an unflagging verbal virtuosity that is in equal parts Baroque fugue and West coast hip-hop. It is an art at which Jelinek is virtually without peer.'—Music & Literature
A new play from Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek that deals with the 2015 terror attack on the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo’s offices in Paris.
In Greek mythology, it is Hera who blinds the hero Heracles, so that, in a fit of fury, he kills his own family. In the twenty-first century, the gods have another name. So did the three young men who stormed a magazine’s editorial office and a Jewish supermarket in Paris in January 2015 and murdered twelve people. The blind fury, however, remained and more virulent than ever, not least because the weapons were so much more effective.
In this raging text, arguably one of her darkest, Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek investigates topical political events in the context of enduring history and myths. Fury expresses itself not only multi-voiced and from the changing perspective of Islamist terrorists (and their special hatred of Jews), in the shape of furious German citizens, individual narcissistic humiliation, or brutal distribution battles around the globe. Rather, fury also appears as the motor that has driven people with a devastating force for centuries.
With her characteristic linguistic power, Jelinek articulates her own disconcertedness in the face of these crimes. In passing, she returns repeatedly to the contradiction between religious laws against representation and the deluge of images online, where movies of assassination, severed heads, and other atrocities are exhibited for millions to see. Fury is a compact grand epic that starts in primal times and attempts to describe the indescribable, relating the inexplicable in our times.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Elfriede Jelinek is a leading member of postwar Austria’s first generation of artists. She is the author of several novels and plays, including On the Royal Road, published by Seagull Books. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004. Gitta Honegger has translated several works by Jelinek, as well as plays by Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard, Peter Handke, Franz Xaver Kroetz and Marieluise Fleißer, among others.
REVIEWS
Praise for Charges (The Supplicants):
'Jelinek has brilliantly adopted the medium of the ancient Greek poets in order to enlighten us about those who have been exiled from their homes and cannot return safely.'—World Literature Today
Praise for Rechnitz and The Merchant's Contract:
'In this new publication, the well-experienced Honegger is clearly up to the task, embracing Jelinek’s encouragement to imitate her linguistic ingenuity when word-for-word translations are out of the question—which is almost always. . . . Still, no amount of translation, either on stage or on the page, can fully remove the texts’ hermetic character. In fact, the successful adaptations of Jelinek’s work tend to acknowledge and even delight in its perplexity. DJ-worthy mixes and mash-ups of premade material, the originals are themselves born through an act of translation that continually calls into question the existence of a definitive Urtext. And as both Stemann’s staging and Honegger’s translation demonstrate, this arduousness by no means rules out entertainment. Toiling through three hundred pages of her impenetrable prose is arguably worthwhile if only to be dazzled by her rhetorical savvy, an unflagging verbal virtuosity that is in equal parts Baroque fugue and West coast hip-hop. It is an art at which Jelinek is virtually without peer.'—Music & Literature
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Fury
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC