Greed

Greed is a 2000 novel by the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek. It tells the story of a policeman who kills a 15-year-old girl while she is giving him a blowjob, and then dumps the body in a lake. It was the first novel of hers to be translated into English after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, and also the first book of hers to be translated into English in seven years. Much of her work is rooted in the Austrian literary tradition, she has also been known to take a feminist stand on the dealings of the communist party. Philip Hensher of The Daily Telegraph wrote: "About 100 pages... into this atrocious novel, I suddenly couldn't bear it one second longer. I thought: before I go any further, I want to read something amusing, lucid, interesting and straightforward." Lucy Ellmann reviewed the book for The Guardian, and wrote that it provides just what the literary landscape needs: "Philip Roth says the novel is dead, but it would be more accurate to say the audience is dead - we're all just too polite to mention it. What is killing the novel is people's growing dependence on feel-good fiction, fantasy and non-fiction. Real writing is not about rules.
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