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Join co-hosts Anne Moore and Chris Stacey for an innovative, exciting, and passionate approach to world literature. We select a country and pick three books over the course of three months: one contemporary, one non-fiction, and one classic. Our current country is Austria. For our third meeting we discuss the contemporary selection The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, translated by Joachim Neugroschel. Winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature and the Heinrich Böll Prize.

Erika Kohut, piano teacher at the very prestigious, very stuffy Vienna Conservatory, is a quiet woman in her mid thirties devoted to Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, and her domineering mother. The two women’s life together is a seamless tissue of desperate boredom, fueled by television movies, neurotic possessiveness, and hopeless dreams of a concert career whose hour has long since passed. Enter Walter Klemmer—handsome, arrogant, athletic, out to conquer the secret of art and Erika’s affections with all the rancid bravado of youth—and suddenly the dark and dangerous passions roiling under the piano teacher’s subdued exterior explode in a release of sexual perversity and long-buried violence. We will also discuss the Duino Elegies" by Rainer Maria Rilke at this book club.

We hope to see you in January to help us create a community you’ll find inviting, fun, engaging and a place to sustain meaningful friendships.

Date: Thursday, January 8, 2026

Time: 6:00PM Central

Location: Private room at a club on Michigan Avenue. Details after signing up.

Reviews

“The Piano Teacher is compelling fiction, ensnaring the reader with the intensity of the author’s vision and the bitter irony she uses to present her view of the city. The prose is disarmingly colloquial, the work of a gifted translator who has carefully preserved the stylistic nuances of the original German and the black humor inherent in Erika’s bizarre encounters. Passionately political.” —Elaine Kendall, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“In my opinion, Elfriede Jelinek is one of the most stimulating, daring, and imaginative writers in present-day Austria. The Piano Teacher confronts the reader with a relentlessly vivid sexual struggle in which dependency and abject self-abasement are strategies to obtain a personal freedom. It’s a dazzling performance that will make the blood run cold.” —Walter Abish

“In this superbly intelligent, psychoanalytic tale Jelinek skillfully plays on the dualisms of repression and domination, repulsion and compulsion, through the exquisitely dark central relationship.” —Leeds Guide

Photo Credit: Grove Atlantic, Promotional Material, Public Domain