There is no comfortable way into Wonderful, Wonderful Times. Elfriede Jelinek drops us into late-1950s Vienna, in the shadow of a war that no one wants to talk about. The rubble is sidestepped, the suits are new, and the past has been pushed just far enough out of sight to be ignored. No one looks back. No one really looks at anything.
“Everything here reeks of decay,” Jelinek writes, “not the slow natural decay of things, but the rancid stench of something violently torn apart and left to rot in the open.” It reads like a diagnosis – not just of the city, but of the four teenagers scraping through it with brittle arrogance and a self-consuming hunger.
Jelinek’s prose is looping, propulsive, and cutting. She writes violence with the same flat clarity as she does interludes of passing conversations and the mundane. The novel is grotesque without being indulgent or artificially dramatised. She does not offer the comfort of aesthetic distance, forcing the reader to confront what the Vienna she depicts refuses to.
The plot (a uniquely un-plot-like one) follows four teenagers: twins Anna and Rainer, and their friends Hans and Sophie. Despite their petty crimes and grand philosophical posturing, they are neither true criminals nor real philosophers, but something altogether bleaker: unremarkable kids, drained of authentic intent, and pathetically incapable of a rebellion that amounts to anything more than flailing attempts at destruction. Whatever harm has been done to them is quickly eclipsed by what they do to others. They drift and wound strangers, their parents, each other, and, ultimately, themselves.
“They don’t want to create anything; they want to destroy, to revel in the collapse, in the sound of glass shattering, in the way a body falls when it is no longer whole.”
Jelinek particularly excels in the domestic scenes, where class anxiety and generational bitterness are stark. Anna and Rainer’s former-SS father clings to his lost authority through violence, directing his perversions at their shrinking mother and theatrically performing his bitterness to make sure no one misses it. Meanwhile, the twins orbit the household constantly looking for opportunities to irritate or provoke.
Hans lives with his mother, once a proud Marxist, now dizzy with class anxiety, who devotes herself to upward mobility. She corrects everything: how he stands, how he speaks, how his shoes are arranged in an attempt to climb the class ladder. Hans mostly lets her try, but makes sure his collar doesn’t sit right and lets his sleeves fray to interrupt her reinvention of them both.
Sophie, a product of wealth, moves through the world with a kind of bored charm. Her parents are largely absent, which suits her fine. She only appears when she wants to, and is gone when she doesn’t, with the detachment of someone who’s always had the option of whether or not to care. Her interest in the group’s little escapades is more casual – less an attempt to destroy something than a vague curiosity about what destruction might feel like.
Violence in these homes flows vertically and in both directions. The children lash out, especially at their mothers, with a hostility startling in its severity and appearance of reflexivity. It’s a cross section of household pathology – lower class, middle class, upper class – and these scenes are an excellent parallel to the subtler but equally unresolved and vaguely combustible mood outside, just in smaller and more intimate rooms.
Youthful idealism is often exalted in literature as a near-sacred emblem of beauty and moral clarity, which, for a moment, Jelinek seems to grant her characters. You’ll want to believe it, and you can, momentarily – of course they are a bit damaged, but surely it’s salvageable. Surely they want something better, or at least believe that “better” might exist. Shortly after you’ve managed to convince yourself of this, Jelinek makes it clear that whatever potential they had has already collapsed into appetite, and any idealism or possibility we might wish to imagine for them has been dampened before it could ignite, immediately traded for the nearest dose of sensation.
War has sunk its teeth into them, and they are its collateral, folding briefly into each other in hollow intimacy and grasping at anything resembling control to see what pushes back.
The novel does not progress so much as accumulate: violence, appetite, and rot. The final scenes are brutal, but not climactic, and nothing is resolved. They are just a logical endpoint of everything Jelinek has meticulously layered in the preceding chapters. She does not allow catharsis or a redemptive arc to soften her indictment of a society unable to confront itself honestly, nor does she attempt to distill history into a clean process or optimistically gesture at redemption. There is no lesson, no upward motion, and certainly no hope.
The “wonderful times” of the title hover somewhere between ironic and taunting. If they refer to the past, it is a past marked by fascism, complicity, and self-erasure. If they point to the future, it is one still out of reach. Nothing in the novel is wonderful, and Jelinek makes no attempt to suggest otherwise. That denial, too, is part of the rot.
I finished the book winded, impressed, and a little resentful. It is not pleasant, but it’s brilliant. Wonderful, Wonderful Times is visceral, exacting, and excellent – not just for how clearly it sees, but for how little it flinches.
Review by Savannah Pawl
This review was written for the ACF London's EXPLORE OUR LIBRARY initiative.
