Nobel prize leaves author fearful

For someone who had just won the Nobel prize for literature and the €1.1m cash that comes with it, Austrian novelist Elfriede Jelinek was not in the best of moods today.

The 57-year-old, whose novel The Pianist was made into an award winning film, said she felt “more despair than peace”.

She had a simple plan for the coming days: “to disappear” and not attend the Nobel ceremony in Sweden next month

Though Jelinek patiently dealt with the phalanx of well-wishers, publishers and journalists, she said she feared that winning literature’s biggest prize would ruin the withdrawn lifestyle she’s chosen for herself in recent years.

“I can’t stand” the attention that comes with the prize, she said at her home on a green hill at the outskirts of Vienna.

“One the one hand, it’s an honour and I’m happy,” she said. “But on the other hand, I’m fearing that my calm life is at risk.”

Jelinek said she has no plans to travel to Stockholm for the December 10 Nobel prize ceremony featuring this year’s other winners, but she will write something to be read there.

“I’m not going because I’m not in a mental shape to withstand such ceremonies,” she said. “I unfortunately suffer from a social phobia.”

“It doesn’t suit me as a person to be put on public display,” she said. “I feel threatened by it. I hope it doesn’t cost me too much. I hope I can enjoy the prize money, because one can live carefree with it.”

Jitters aside, Jelinek was clearly happy that the Swedish Academy selected her to be the first woman to win the prize since 1996 – and only the tenth in history

“It is the biggest honour,” she said.

Alfred Nobel, the Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite who endowed the awards, left only vague guidance about the prize, saying in his will that the literature honour should go to those “who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”.

Jelinek said she thinks her works fit that description.

“When I write, I have always tried to be on the side of the weak. The side of the powerful is not literature’s side,” she said.

Her most recent work, the 2003 play Bambiland, was a head-on attack on the US invasion of Iraq. A sequel, titled Babel, is set to appear in May as Jelinek’s first post-Nobel work.

Babel deals with “the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison but also with the mutilation of the bodies of the US soldiers in Fallujah,” Jelinek said.

Her best known work is 1988’s The Piano Teacher, which was adapted into an award winning film.

The novel and the film tell the story of a piano instructor, Erika – a demanding taskmaster who embarks on a dramatic affair with a younger music student.

She is a controversial figure in Austria who sharply criticised the 2000 government that included the ultra-right Freedom Party. Austria was slapped with EU sanctions for seven months because of the party’s inclusion in the government.

At the time, she banned performances of her plays in Austria.

“I tried to work against it as soon as I saw it,” she said of the rise of the rightists. “But thank God, the rightists are not as strong any more.”

Although her plays can once again be seen in Austria, Jelinek said she has mixed feelings toward her homeland.

“It’s a love for Vienna and for a few other places. But I have no patriotism for this country,” she said.