The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek

Read Along with Tony DuShane November/December

Welcome to our new read along. The reading schedule and access info to the November 30th zoom link is below.

The Piano Teacher came out in 1983 in Austria and has been translated into English from German. Elfriede won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. So, why the hype?

From the back cover:

“Her life appears boring, but Erika has a secret: she visits Turkish peep shows at night and watches sadomasochistic films. When a handsome, self-absorbed, seventeen-year-old student attempts to seduce her, she resists—but then the dark passions roiling under her subdued exterior explode ina release of perversity, violence, and degradation.”

How can we not love that?

I’ve only read the first 50 pages, I tend to read up to page 50 when I pick these books then immediately stop to get these charmers onto our reading schedule.

As far as translating work, I had a great discussion with translator Diego Gerard Morrison on Drinks with Tony where he says no translation can truly represent the original work, they become works of their own. So, with that in mind we also have to give props to the translator Joachim Neugroschel, who conveys the heart of this work. It also makes me wonder if German to English is easier to translate than romance languages to English since romance languages have a song of sorts to them that’s hard for us to capture. I digress.

Here’s our reading schedule to try to hit, faster or slower is fine, you don’t need to have finished the book before attending our group discussion.

Pages 1-88 by November 13
Pages 89 - 184 by November 20
Pages 185 - 280 by November 27
Zoom discussion for paid substack members on Saturday, November 30th at 9am PST / 12pm EST / 20h00 GMT

To reserve your spot email dushane@gmail.com

Why Read Along with Tony DuShane?

I was shocked when I found out many high schoolers never read an entire book before graduating and even worse, professors in elite colleges have stopped assigning books to their students to appease their short attention span. What a crock. That’s like amputating someone’s arm and telling them it’s okay, they don’t really need it.

Reading novels is the true building of the soul. It demands our time and concentration. If we’re not practiced readers we can become practiced readers, and after that we’ll crave novels and they’ll be part of our everyday existence.

If you’re new to the journey of reading please join us. Even if you can only read a few pages a day, just read a few pages a day. Don’t make it a burden, make it a delight. The book will wait for you tomorrow to be picked up again. We’re in a time that rewards fast consumption, but that’s just fast food for the brain slowly rotting our insides. Indulge in a storytelling meal that can last a week, a month, a year.

Novels will change you, change how you think, shift you ever so slightly to see the world as interconnected through space and time. We can read the craft of a woman who wrote about Vienna from the point of view of her character in the 1980s. It’s time travel. It’s more important than reading non-fiction because we can get into the soul of that moment, into the mind of the author, and we can truly experience that life…. a life which is often not so different from ours. A life rich in imagination.

Our imaginations are in overdrive every day. We play scenarios in our heads, when someone disrespects us we may not say words out loud, but our mind is conjuring up the scene in a different way, truly showing us what’s in our hearts and souls. When we tap into that we may find ourselves sounding insane, yet we all do it. Then, when we realize we all do it, it doesn’t become a source of discomfort, it becomes a chance for true connection with our fellow human beings in the present as well as the past and future.

If this is your first time joining us I want you to know that you’ll be welcomed with open arms. If you’re reading novels constantly you’ve also found the right place. Join us fellow weirdos in this journey.

I look forward to the discussion as well as your opinions. There are no wrong opinions, when you do have opinion about a book or a piece of writing the important part is sifting through the WHY of your opinion. Why do you feel that way? That’s where the journey of the soul continues, if you know why you love a book, you’ll find others you’ll love even more. If you know why you hate a book, you’ll veer away from similar books to discover other books that you’ll fall in love with. Indulge yourself to truly connect to the work.

Love,

Tony