…that household name, Elfriede Jelinek! Well, at least I was half-right in my predictions, when I said that it was not unlikely that nobody among those mentioned as possibilities would actually win. After a perusal of Jelinek’s bio on the Nobel site, however, I was surprised to discover that I had a glancing, if indirect, familiarity with her work. Michael Haneke’s film “The Piano Teacher” was based on Jelinek’s novel, Die Klavierspielerin (1983). I remember it being a compelling, if gruelling, piece of work. Another encouraging sign is that, according to the Swedish Academy: “Her writing builds on a lengthy Austrian tradition of linguistically sophisticated social criticism, with precursors such as Johann Nepomuk Nestroy, Karl Kraus, �d�n von Horv�th, Elias Canetti, Thomas Bernhard and the Wiener Group.”On the evidence of The Piano Teacher (at least its filmic version) and the quote above, anyone who thinks Thomas Bernhard is one of the major writers of the second half of the previous century, might consider familiarising themselves with the newest Nobel laureate�s oeuvre.