The Children of the Dead

February 19, 2024
In this monumental zombie novel from Nobel winner Jelinek (The Piano Teacher), originally published in 1995 and now translated into English for the first time, three reanimated people wander the rooms and hiking trails of an Alpine resort in Austria. They are Edgar Gstranz, a skilled skier who died in a car crash; Gudrun Bichler, who died by suicide before her university exams; and bus accident victim Karin Frenzel, a middle-aged widow and “eternal daughter” brought to the inn with her mother. As these undead characters share meals and walks with various guests, victims of the Holocaust begin rising from the ground in the surrounding forest. The glacial pace and dense writing preclude the standard thrills of zombie fiction, but patient readers will delight in Jelinek’s wild Joycean wordplay, elegantly translated by Honegger—of the sex-crazed undead, she writes, “Their hands play in the manner of well-bred children, without fighting, they like showing off the wakened worm peeking out of the hard hosenlegs whenever they have an audience.” Full of unexpected beauty, this challenging and troubling story is one to savor.