SOURCE: Cocalis, Susan L. Review of Die Kinder der Toten, by Elfriede Jelinek. World Literature Today 70, no. 4 (autumn 1996): 946-47.

In the following review of Die Kinder der Toten, Cocalis argues that Jelinek's prose style and subject material are enjoyable in “small doses,” but are too excessive and overwhelming in novel form.

While reading Elfriede Jelinek's latest novel Die Kinder der Toten (The Children of the Dead), one cannot help thinking that Ingeborg Bachmann is not the only postwar Austrian woman writer who was obsessed with death and ways of dying (Todesarten). In the tradition of Bachmann's prose works, Jelinek relates her meditations on death to the legacy of Austro-fascism, but she goes far beyond Bachmann in her merciless scrutiny of Austrian pop culture, consumerism, and middle-class values. She also outdoes her literary predecessor in her graphic descriptions of the brutality of male-female relations. But for Jelinek, the women...