This Makes Me Yearn for the Days of Rigoberta Menchu

Elfriede Jelinek, an Austrian novelist, was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

In its citation, the 18-member Swedish Academy said Ms. Jelinek, 57, had been chosen "for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power."

The "absurdity of society's cliches and their subjugating power"? I think I used that line in a humanities paper my freshman year of college.

Let's continue:

"The Piano Teacher," one of her darker novels, was turned into a French-language movie by the Austrian director Michael Haneke ("Funny Games"), with Isabelle Huppert in the role of Erika Kohut, a music teacher who seeks escape from her oppressive mother through sexual kinkiness. The movie, no less than the novel, shocked some people with its sexual violence.

Reviewing the novel in The New York Times in 1988, Michiko Kakutani wrote of Ms. Jelinek's "uncompromising vision," but noted: "Too often, however, her descriptions of Erika's violent fantasies seem willfully perverse — as though they'd been concocted for the sole purpose of shocking the reader — and her relentless focus on the dark underside of Viennese life can seem equally artificial and contrived. In the end, it makes for a novel that depresses rather than genuinely disturbs."

Sounds like a winner to me. And then, of course, this priceless nugget:

In 1974, she joined the Austrian Communist Party and remained a member until 1991.

1991? 1991? So it didn't dawn on Ms. Jelinek until 1991 that maybe, just maybe, this communism thing wasn't such a good idea. Amazing.