The Children of the Dead

The magnum opus of 2004 Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek—a spectral journey through the catastrophic history embedded in the landscape of Austria  “The surface of [Jelinek’s] prose cracks and bursts . . . fissured by phantasmagorical description, gallows humor, multilingual puns, and scouring sarcasm. . . . Jelinek’s novel is finally . . . a furious accumulation of lost moments and possible outcomes, an enormous, spectral kaleidoscope erected before the unfathomable.â€