Greed (Jelinek novel)

Greed (German: Gier) is a 2000 novel by the Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek. It was the first novel of hers to be translated into English after winning the Nobel Prize for Literature, and also the first book of hers to be translated into English in seven years. While much of her work is rooted in the Austrian literary tradition, she has also been known to take a feminist stand on the dealings of the Communist Party of Austria.

The novel tells the story of a policeman who kills a 15-year-old girl while she is performing fellatio and then dumps the body in a lake.

Philip Hensher of The Daily Telegraph wrote: "About 100 pages into this atrocious novel, I suddenly couldn't bear it one second longer. I thought: before I go any further, I want to read something amusing, lucid, interesting and straightforward." Hensher continued: "A story of some sort emerges, but the thrust of the novel is really the most vulgar and stupid commentary imaginable about the murderous misogyny of men, the environment, the appalling taste of the kleinburgerlicher and so on. ... Densely unreadable as it is, there is something terribly banal about every one of its intellectual propositions; as hopelessly banal in its attempted chic as its predominant present tense."Lucy Ellmann reviewed the book for The Guardian, and wrote that it provides just what the literary landscape needs: "Philip Roth says the novel is dead, but it would be more accurate to say the audience is dead - we're all just too polite to mention it. What is killing the novel is people's growing dependence on feel-good fiction, fantasy and non-fiction. ... Real writing is not about rules. It's about electrifying prose, it's about play." Ellmann wrote: "Jelinek gives us a startling glimpse here of what women are, as well as answering Freud's question, 'What do women want?' It's neither gentle nor sweet nor safe nor reasonable - just true."