Wonderful, Wonderful Times     by Elfriede Jelinek Original title: Die Ausgesperrten Original language: German Published by Serpent's Tail Publishing Ltd Pub. Date: 1990 Format: Paperback, 176 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.60 x 7.82 x 5.02 ISBN: 1852421681 List Price: $13.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.87 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.16 Published by Serpent's Tail Pub. Date: 1990 Format: Paperback, 240 pages List Price: £8.99 Not available for ordering

One of the most famous women writers in German, Jelinek said in 1980 ‘Austria is a criminal nation’, referring to the largely unacknowledged Austrian participation in the crimes of the Third Reich, as a province of Greater Germany after 1938. >From the very first page where she alludes to ‘innocent perpetrators... with their wartime memories’ she begins to beat her fellow countrymen with the stick of their enthusiastic participation on all fronts in the Nazi war against humanity.

Because this is a novel — and a good one — rather than a speech at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, the story of Austria’s dirty war and the subsequent failure to come to terms with it is told through specific individuals. In particular there is an all-round monster of a man, who served with the SS on the Eastern Front ‘up to... the ankles of our riding-boots in blood in Polish villages’ and who is now trying to recapture the thrill of humiliating others by bullying his wife into posing for porno photos in the kitchen. His son, Rainer, is a kind of twisted boy genius sprung from the thin intellectual soil of the impoverished petty-bourgeoisie and full of bitterness and frustration. With his sister and two other youngsters he forms a little gang of nihilists who, from a mixture of personal motives and hang-ups, plot and carry out acts of random violence. Part of Jelinek’s genius is to make this deeply unsympathetic quartet of adolescents sympathetic. Their world is one where the rapidly developing consumer prosperity of the 1960s of American youth fashions and music coexists with an older generation made up of ‘war invalids ...thinking of the time when they were still somebody, on enemy territory in a foreign land, somebody they no longer were...’. She is writing of the time in which she herself grew up and brings a lovely detail of texture to her novel, felicitously translated by Michael Hulse.

What makes the book indispensable is its insistent air of reality, of honesty about things, for instance the limits of some peoples’ lives — ‘If you don’t have the cash you get your sunshine from things you don’t really need. Or else the daily grind...’ — while others coast by sleazily on their borrowed grace ‘Sophie’s mother materialises, from out of a huge inherited fortune, in front of the huge iron gateway’.

A well-written assembly of characters that beautifully encapsulate the major strands of postwar Austrian everyday life, not so different from England — ‘Sunday outings with Mother surface, trains smelling of damp socks, crammed with pathetic grey crowds of people of the kind a long war produces and cannot disperse right away’ —— but with the great difference that instead of having fought with sacrifice a just war this small nation is up to its gills in the blood of others.

‘Father often thinks of the dark skeletons of people he killed. The white and immaculate snow of Poland turned bloody and maculate. But snow goes on falling, again and again, and by now it bears no trace of those who disappeared there.’ p32