Jelinek uses the mass phenomenon of sport as a metaphor for all the excessive endeavours people in financially secure, developed nations carry out to stay beautiful, strong and “fashionable,” even if only at home in front of the computer. Fitness and body cults as well as the idolatry of sportsmen as modern heroes are portrayed using Andi, a farmer’s lad and undead bodybuilder who emulates his role model Arnold Schwarzenegger and has destroyed himself with anabolic steroids. At the same time, the writer herself appears as “someone who fouls her own nest,” an “undifferentiated, aging moralist” and killjoy. What starts out as a physical training ritual ends as a frenzied national hate campaign.
