It's difficult to give an accurate picture of this extraordinary text in a review. Here goes: it’s a long dialogue between Brünnhilde and Wotan, which puts some of the themes of Das Ring des Nibelungen through a modern and essentially Marxist lens. The writing is dense, at times poetic and even though it is divided into sentences (although not paragraphs - when you first pick the book up its unbroken text page after page has a formidable quality) each ‘speech’ reads as a single unbroken utterance. It’s endlessly thought provoking and the characterisation is brilliantly achieved: Brünnhilde is smart, cynical, witty and direct. Wotan is patrician in a compellingly awful way.
You could of course read this without knowing Wagner’s ‘poems’ for the operas but without trying to be exclusionist I think so much of the book would then be lost. Although the initial spark for the conversation appears to come after the construction of Valhalla in Das Rheingold, both characters are aware of the entire action of Das Ring (indeed Jelinek introduces Wotan as ‘Wotan/the Wanderer’) and it permeates the entire text, its ideas and purpose.
The images I had in my mind when reading this were all from Patrice Chereau’s 1976 Bayreuth production which given his famously Marxist reading, with the gods as the epitome of exploitative industrialists feels apt.
The blurb tells us that the text was originally written as a libretto. I’d be intrigued to understand the differences and how this might work as a dramatic performance but I can’t help feeling that the way the book lays its images and concepts out is best suited to a solitary reader.
Gitta Honegger’s translation hits what appears to be an accurate tone from the start which I want to assume is Jelinek’s own.
This is a remarkable and profoundly original book.
PS I keep reading that Fitzcarraldo covers are blue for Fiction, white for Non Fiction but this can’t be right - this is most certainly not Non Fiction and I am also reading some Annie Ernaux (reviews to follow) and similarly confused. ( )