Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
He wants to get hold of the property of women, this man, at which he possesses great skill, which now, however, increasingly seems to be leaving him. He doesn't so much care about personal conquest; he's after property -- combining: "the pleasing with the useful". At the heart of Union Atlantic lies a test of wills between a retired history teacher, Charlotte Graves—who has suddenly begun to hear her two dogs speaking to her in the voices of Cotton Mather and Malcolm X—and an ambitious young banker, Doug Fanning, who is building an ostentatious mansion on what was once Charlotte’s family land. Drawn into the conflict is Nate Fuller, a troubled high-school student who stirs powerful emotions in both of them. What emerges is a riveting story of financial power, the defense of tradition, and the distortions of desire these forces create.
Goodreads Kings of Sin Series by Ana Huang - Goodreads
of a killer:] "…he shot his cousin, girlfriend and her mommy full in the face with a pump-action gun, but they didn’t need their faces after that anyway." Janisch is a Gendarm (as opposed to policeman -- Polizist), as Austrian law enforcement outside most larger urban areas was handled by the Gendarmerie (until 2005, when it was absorbed by the police); Chalmers translates Gendarm as 'country policeman'.] Themes in poetry are often quite apparent, but that isn’t always the case. Sometimes the theme doesn’t make itself apparent and is instead up to the reader. Reading a poem aloud often helps with understanding the theme. Here are some examples:
They long seem blind to just how terrible Janisch is -- or are attracted to that uniformed symbol of power from which they naturally expect abuse -- and while that seems ridiculously exaggerated it does allow Jelinek to ultimately present something of a shift. Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, but I had never read her work before. One of her previous novels, The Piano Teacher, was apparently made into a film that won several prizes in Cannes in 2001, but I have never seen it. So I had little to prepare me for Greed, her latest work to be translated into English. But I did have some preparation: last year, as a bet, I read James Joyce’s Ulysses. There are many similarities. If you like complex, stream-of-consciousness literature, you’ll love this book.
Hierarchy: The Whitewashing of Indigenous Before Maslow’s Hierarchy: The Whitewashing of Indigenous
What are your thoughts on this story? Had you heard it before? What do you wonder as you read this? I’ll give you an example of the writing style, if you sign up to read this. This passage is when the policeman brings the underage girl into the home of the older woman:
Their devotion is clingy -- none more so than Gerti's -- and complete -- while Janisch often seems largely indifferent, his conquests more like a job, the possibility of property-acquisition not so much the ultimate but rather the only goal. Its dark worldview -- with specifically Austrian conditions and politics certainly coloring the overall feel ("soon the whole world will be Carinthia", she suggests, in one of the most amusing asides -- Carinthia notoriously being the 'brownest' (as in lingeringly Nazi-brown) of the Austrian provinces, with Jörg Haider governor at the time the action takes place) -- and arguably ridiculously simplistic (and/or exaggerated) in its presentation of the sexes and their roles.
The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed
There is more subtlety to Greed than there might first seem, and a nice touch is how, when, after he has murdered Gabi, Janisch begins sweating it, a bit (not least because he knows Gerti an cause him problems).Instead, the woman stubbornly remains alive, Ernst's wife forced to care for the old invalid, a considerably greater burden than anticipated.
Greed: A Pulse-Pounding Thriller (An Amber Monroe Crime
She is not his usual type of conquest -- not even sixteen yet, she doesn't offer much real estate potential yet. There is a playfulness to some of it, and Jelinek relies on some of the clichés and clichéd expression of popular fiction for effect, but the mélange that is Greed is much more and messier than just this. The original German edition of Greed comes with a descriptive subtitle, presenting it as: Ein Unterhaltungsroman -- an 'entertainment-novel' --, suggesting a light, diverting read; of course, Jelinek's novel is anything but. Janisch's interest in these women mostly isn't primarily sexual; what he's really after is their real estate holdings.Ernst and his family already have their own house -- but it's not quite theirs: they entered into an agreement with the old woman who owns it, allowing her to remain in the house until she dies -- which they had imagined would happen very soon. The narrative swirls more than it proceeds, Jelinek taking in a great deal surrounding the limited plot -- yet often without going into many of what would seem the more obvious details, speaking more in generalities. It's a third of the way through the novel before the murder actually takes place -- and almost three-quarters before the body is then actually found and a murder investigation gets under way. Architecture Art Biography & Memoir Business & Economics Classics Cooking Fiction Graphic Novels Health Historical Fiction History Literary Criticism Literary Fiction Music Mystery & Thrillers Nature Performing Arts Poetry Politics Science Self-Help Social Science Spirituality & Religion Sports Writing Travel A bit more suspense comes from the fact that Gerti could, if she wanted to, put two and two together, as she knows (all too well) of Janisch's relationship with Gabi, and that he drove off with her.
Great Deal 
New Comment