Elfriede Jelinek.

• Author: Siegal, Nina
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

Austrian novelist and playwright Elfriede Jelinek wasn't an obvious choice for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. Her dense, strident political satires exploring sexual perversion and social decadence aren't exactly mass-market fare. And because only a few of her novels have been translated, her work is largely unknown outside the German-speaking world.

As a result, the announcement by the Swedish Academy was greeted with everything from confusion to vitriol. One of the panel's eighteen lifetime members resigned in protest, calling Jelinek's writing nothing but "degradation, humiliation, desecration and self-disgust, sadism and masochism." The Weekly Standard declared that the Nobel panel was "destroying literary standards" by selecting an "unknown, undistinguished, leftist fanatic," citing her membership in the Communist Party of Austria from 1974 to 1991.

But Jelinek has her backers, too. In granting the prize, the Swedish Academy wrote that the "extraordinary linguistic zeal" of her writing reveals "the absurdity of society's clichs and their subjugating power." And Horace Engdahl, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, praised her ironic nihilism, saying, "If literature is a force that leads to nothing, you are, in our day, one of its truest representatives."

Jelinek didn't travel to Stockholm to accept her award in person because she suffers from crippling agoraphobia. "I'm unable to be in crowds," she told The New York Times when asked why she wouldn't attend. "And I can't bear to be looked at."

It's a surprising admission from one of Austria's most public figures. In the late 1990s, she became a household name when she began to publicly criticize the far-right Austrian Freedom Party, which participated in the ruling government from 2000 to 2006 in a coalition with the Austrian People's Party. The Austrian Freedom Party counterattacked, running a series of ads criticizing Jelinek by name: "Do You Want Jelinek ... or Do You Want Art?" the posters said.

She's still not shy about placing herself at the center of political controversy. Her play, Bambiland , a stream of consciousness monologue spoken by a series of actors, was an allegory about the war in Iraq and made references to Abu Ghraib. She has told interviewers that she finds President Bush frightening, and she frequently weighs in on world affairs on her website.

But her novels, such as the satiric Die Liebhaberinnen (1975), translated into English in 1994 as Women as Lovers , and Lust (English version, 1992), which was marketed as "female pornography" by her German...