Rein Gold

‘Translated with verve by Gitta Honegger, [rein GOLD] becomes a series of monologues without paragraph breaks: a frequent discordant assault on the senses. A visceral challenge to lazy and pernicious consumerism… Brünnhilde and Wotan may have the names of gods, but they play down and dirty, their lengthy slanging match ripe with expletives and references to popular culture and Marxist and anarchist theory, the most obvious being Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s slogan “Property is theft.”… Jelinek’s critique is simultaneously timely and timeless, as Brünnhilde and Wotan’s arguments and digressions map capitalism’s progression.’
— Catherine Taylor, Financial Times

‘The liveliness of Jelinek’s language (in Gitta Honegger’s translation, which deftly renders all manner of wordplay) is undeniable… rein GOLD is highly evocative of the endless onward stagger of late capitalism’
— Martin Herbert, ArtReview

‘on the page, the language crackles, playing, again, with her familiar themes of, as she has termed them, “cruelty, the lack of consideration of the strong for the weak, and the master-servant relationship, in the Hegelian sense.”’
— Rhian Sasseen, The Point

‘rein GOLD is a forbidding, virtuosic reimagining of Wagner’s quartet of music dramas..Like many of Jelinek’s writings, it is a kind of concatenation, building complex chains of association across topics, symbols, and histories... rein GOLD is a crafty response to Wagner’s literary and dramatic technique. Jelinek (and Honegger) cleave carefully to the alliteration that characterizes Wagner’s verse. In the “Ring,” it gives clusters of thought an internal cohesion and a brooding, ruminative character. In Jelinek’s rein GOLD energetic bursts of alliterative play create concentrations of images and ideas inside monumental and unyielding paragraphing. In this respect it is truly Wagnerian: motivic micro-invention and transformation carried inside a vast textural and dramatic sweep.’
— Benjamin Poore, Van Magazine

‘Jelinek’s prose and arguments are undoubtedly masterful; she is, despite the never-ending controversy around her boundary-breaking work, rightfully regarded as one of the greatest living authors writing in German. Honegger’s translation is vivid and equally as skilled … rein GOLD is not a comfortable read, but really, given the subject matter, should it be? Wagner is not especially comfortable to sit through either, but you don’t go to see his Ring Cycle for a light, airy performance. You go to see and hear a work of genius. Important literature is rarely easily digestible.’
— Ella Fox Martens, Soft Punk

‘Another interesting release from the excellent Fitzcarraldo Editions, rein GOLD is a playful and digressive dissection of capitalism…’
— Joshua Rees, Buzz Magazine

‘the characters in rein GOLD do make deft contrapuntal patterns with ideas, and their twin streams of consciousness gush, eddy and sometimes drool or drivel’
— Peter Conrad, Observer

‘In rein GOLD, Jelinek reimagines the characters of Brünnhilde and Wotan from Wagner’s Ring cycle and transposes them into the context of modernity. She delivers an impassioned exposé of the discontents of capitalism. Her musical thought is interwoven with myth, politics, and Wagnerian motifs. Gitta Honegger’s excellent translation allows us to experience the intense flow of her characters’ streams of consciousness entangled in greed and alienation.’
— Xiaolu Guo, author of a A Lover's Discourse

‘rein GOLD is a masterful, obsessional, hypnotic journey. Jelinek brings a sharp modernity and relevance to a series of inward wanderings. She is equal to a great myth and makes it new.’
— A.L. Kennedy, author of The Little Snake

‘Living legend Elfriede Jelinek’s rein GOLD, rhapsodically written from the maw of forlorn gods, echoes like an incensed dialogue-eulogy designed to fill the space soon left behind the eventual implosion of the twenty-first century’s bottomless appetite for capital, for absent love. “For what?” rein GOLD’s Brünnhilde asks and asks, trying out answers like mad masks, in search of something lost out here among us that even the gods cannot quite name, yet found as if alive here for all to feel – as in the masterworks of Bernhard’s Correction and Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H. – by the inimitable, majestically incensed end-visions of master Jelinek.’
— Blake Butler, author of Alice Knott