Elfriede Jelinek follows in the footsteps of the wanderers from Franz Schubert’s famous song cycle “Winterreise”. Her “Winter’s Journey” begins with the insanity of the present day, touching on banking scandals and the plight of kidnapping victims before heading more clearly towards autobiographical territory: Jelinek’s complicated relationship with her mother and her father’s committal to a psychiatric hospital. With its impressively dense language and surprising intimacy, Elfriede Jelinek’s “Winter’s Journey” evokes all the major themes present in her writing over the decades. The result is one of the Nobel Prize winner’s most personal and touching works.
