Originally published in 1995 in German, the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek’s “The Children of the Dead” is perhaps the only zombie novel written by a Nobel Prize winner. Of course — Jelinek being Jelinek — it is a great deal more than that: a savage reckoning with the Holocaust; an indictment of consumer culture; a compilation of ghastly erotica replete with undead orgies; an erudite display of Joycean wordplay; and a relentlessly bleak portrait of the human capacity for self-deception.
Jelinek, who won the Nobel in 2004, is best known as a playwright, though English readers are likely most familiar with her novel “The Piano Teacher,” later made into an award-winning film. Considered to be her magnum opus, “The Children of the Dead” — nearly 500 pages of dense, polyvocal narrative — has recently been issued for the first time in English. (Translator Gitta Honegger deserves acknowledgment for this herculean rendering.) Like much of Jelinek’s work, it is nearly immune to plot summary. We follow the posthumous lives of three individuals in and around the Alpenrose, an Austrian resort hotel, sometime in the late 20th century. The first is Edgar Gstranz, an accomplished skier who died in a car accident. The second is Gudrun Bichler, a student who died by suicide because of school-related anxiety. The third (and possibly fourth?) is Karin Frenzel, a lonely widow who seems to have fallen into a ravine in one instance and perished in a bus accident in another. (They are referred to as Karin One and Karin Two.) Gathered below the surrounding forests are the masses of Holocaust dead consigned to obscurity, awaiting their opportunity for revenge.
Jelinek’s protagonists don’t know they’ve passed on. Like macabre tourists, the dead appear suddenly in various Alpine surroundings — hotel rooms, mountain trails, dining halls, country roads — without any knowledge of their demise. They awake in bewilderment, their memories blurred or strangely sutured, their motivations unclear. Though they perceive both the living and the dead — “quasi-folded” men and women often missing portions of their bodies — they can’t quite parse the difference. (The living are largely oblivious of any incursion.)
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The narrator, mordantly witty and possibly dead herself, refers to these initial shambling wrecks — like scouts before an army’s arrival — as “Those Out There” and the “in-between things.” Despite their long decay, or maybe because of it, they revive in states of remarkable horniness. The majority of their time above ground is spent engaging in various sexual acts, both singly and in groups. Necrophilia is the book’s operative kink, a morbid, poetic pornography composed of “a night music of flesh.”
These in-between things are not the novel’s only lifeless figures. Jelinek portrays contemporary Austrians as another species of walking dead, materialist zombies pursuing mindless entertainment, junk food and bad television. She pokes fun at their spandex clothing, at their worship of skiers, at their striving to forget the recent past. It is perhaps this historical amnesia that enables the dead to return in the first place. “Who selected them, on whose request?” the narrator asks. The questions go unanswered, though the novel suggests a collective responsibility. National repression here serves as a catastrophic portal.
The Holocaust curdles beneath the novel’s surface, both literally and figuratively. It is an ever-present reality at the Alpenrose, where “time and space extend like an animal that just got up and stretches its limbs.” Nazi crimes are not called out specifically but rather gestured at through a haunted, hole-filled language. They manifest as dreamlike fragments: references to ruined places, lost names, concentration camps, banned artworks, cardboard luggage, death trains. “Millions of dead, simply thrown away by history,” the narrator says, “a handful over the left shoulder so that they won’t return. Like accidentally spilled salt.” But the superstitious gesture is in vain; they do return, a subterranean pressure giving way to the inconvenient eruption of memory.
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The novel offers little in the way of forward momentum, let alone catharsis. It is rather like the emptying of a basin whose draining creates the only movement possible, a kind of desperate whirling. Our three protagonists are thrown about in this vortex, their fates riding the edge of intelligibility. After prodigious wandering and multiple erotic entanglements, Edgar and Gudrun very nearly come together in a moment of connection — sexual or spiritual, it’s difficult to tell — before disappearing completely. Broken by her domineering mother, Karin finally climbs to the ceiling, “Exorcist”-style, to sprout vast quantities of hair out of which emerge three larvae: “hardened loaves of bread of milky-white embryonal mass, two bigger ones, one smaller, horrific all of them.” Like a failed ark, the Alpenrose itself is eventually covered over by an apocalyptic mudslide brought about by the coming of the dead.
Jelinek’s language — corpulent, ironic, revolting, transcendent — destabilizes the novel. The surface of its prose cracks and bursts as readily as the earth around the Alpenrose, fissured by phantasmagorical description, gallows humor, multilingual puns and scouring sarcasm. Jelinek’s unclassifiable strangeness, her gross-out body horror, her necrophiliac relish and bitter critique of contemporaneity can be read as a kind of moral passion. At a certain height, such profanity attains a dimension of purity, or else the very idea of these categories falls away. The Alpenrose exists on the border of this elevation, an outpost of terrifying volatility.
“It takes so little to be dead,” the narrator says, “and yet death is so difficult to grasp.” Jelinek’s novel is finally a response to that difficulty. It is a furious accumulation of lost moments and possible outcomes, an enormous, spectral kaleidoscope erected before the unfathomable. There is solace in the fact that death’s injustice is shared by all humanity — but not much: “We, the recovered ones, experienced it all, and now we talk about it as if a word had just brushed against us and, in passing, suddenly stepped on us.”
Dustin Illingworth is a critic whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, the Atlantic and the Nation, among other places.
The Children of the Dead
By Elfriede Jelinek; translated from German by Gitta Honegger
Yale University Press. 483 pp. $32.50
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