I substitute-taught for a class at our older daughter’s school last week. At dinner she said one of her classmates told her, after seeing me in person, that I have the face of a twenty-year-old and the hair of a fifty-year-old. I’m still processing this bizarre observation. For now I can only say the child was wrong. I do not have the face of a twenty-year-old. I’ve suffered too much sun damage for that. And my hair is more like the hair of someone who is seventy, or at least sixty. It’s freaking grey as hell. I should dye it brown. I should make it brown again. I should win a million dollars gambling online and spend it all on my beautiful face. I should do it in the name of building a better world for my face and my ancient hair.Elfriede JelinekI’ve been reading the novel The Piano Teacher by the Austrian author Elfriede Jelinek, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. My path to reading it was an unhappy one, and I’ll get into that in a minute. But the novel is great. Of course it is. I didn’t know it existed until recently. I didn’t know about Elfriede Jelinek until last week, and isn’t that sad? She won the Nobel Prize, in my lifetime. I should have at least known her name.It’s ridiculous! And, you know, don’t get me wrong. There are more important things than the Nobel Prize.I don’t ever care much about the Nobel Prize, or other prizes, because I am a creature of light, a child of the stars. As a traveler to this place from distant galaxies, I care not for worldly things like literature awards. My interest is in beauty and the marks that words make on the human soul. And I don’t think it’s strictly my fault that I near heard of Elfriede Jelinek. When I searched for one of her books through my library, I learned that they don’t have even one of them. When I searched for a copy of The Piano Teacher online, to buy, all I could find were used copies. Are her books out of print in the United States? I don’t know. I’m not sure how to find that out. It seems like they are. My heart tells me they are. But the heart can lead its bearer astray.At least I can say I wasn’t completely ignorant of this author and her work. I once heard about the film adaptation of The Piano Teacher, starring Isabelle Huppert. A friend described it to me, in some detail, in about 2007. She did it with a certain horror in her voice. I recall from her description that someone in the movie gets their hand sliced up with broken glass. I would be harder on myself, for not knowing about Elfriede Jelinek, and not having seen The Piano Teacher myself, were it not for the childrearing I’ve been participating in for the last eleven years. I’m still hard on myself, for a lot of things, but I want to give myself some slack when I recall how many times in the last decade I’ve watched Frozen, Inside Out, Frozen 2, movies that star CGI Spider-Man, movies that star CGI Legos, and so many others. When you’ve got kids around, it’s hard to engage with the warped psychology of characters that feel uncannily real as they come alive on the page. You’re too busy changing diapers, fetching snacks, and lulling kids to sleep for things like that.I’m not complaining! I would not give back those fulfilled duties and repeated viewings of children’s films for anything. And I can’t mention those activities without admitting that, while they have taken up much of my time, they’ve taken up more of the time of my partner in this, the children’s mother, my wife. When the kids need something, they call out to her. It doesn’t matter if I’m nearer to them than she is. She is the one they trust most. She is their mother. And I could have read The Piano Teacher at any time before our elder daughter was born. It was first published two years after the year of my birth. All I’m saying is that I’ve spent eleven years without a lot of time to myself. It’s for the best possible reasons, but I’ve missed out on some things. It’s not out of the question that if I’d never once watched Frozen I’d have read the novel The Piano Teacher sometime between 2012 and now. I didn’t even know that movie was based on a novel until the other day when I was listening to a podcast I like quite a lot, The Culture We Deserve. I don’t remember why Jessa Crispin said something about it, or what she said exactly. I recall only that it came up, and I was like, That movie with the broken glass hands thing was based on a book? What? Oh my god.Now that I’ve read the novel, I don’t know how anyone adapted it into a movie. I doff my hat to the people who did it, but honestly I’d doff my hat to anyone who read this book and considered making it a film remotely possible. It’s one of the most intense things I’ve ever read. It’s like watching a slow-motion recording of someone having a panic attack. The passage of time throughout it can be hard to track, because everything happens inside characters’ minds...
