Religious Critics

The Vatican’s newspaper,L’Osservatore Romano, isn’t very pleased with Elfriede Jelinek’s Nobel Prize, focusing in particular on her novel, The Piano Teacher, which was made into a movie a few years ago.

“Three hundred pages of brutal recklessness, perverse psychologies and destructive feminine genealogy, intended only to denounce the irremediable inheritance of evil, sin, violence in every form of love,” was how L’Osservatore Romano summed up the novel.
The newspaper criticized Jelinek’s works because “her topics are quickly channeled into descriptions of the feminine world, between scenes of crude sexuality, which are not conducive to an understanding of the emancipation of woman.” It assailed the work for “linking sex to pathology, power and violence.”

I’m always mystified when people think literature should present the world not as it is, but as it should be.