There is a peculiar reliance on language in Jelinek's books. So far each novel shows a different side of Jelinek. Lust is Jelinek at her most witty, with language games and puns abounding.

The language here is in service to, of course, lust and sexuality. Words are often followed by a homophonic twin, double entendres and playful or juvenile nicknames for genitals are as abundant as the husband's sexual whims. Remember how exhausting the ten-minute *YOU-KNOW* scene in Gaspar Noe's Irreversible was? I don't mean that this novel is as thematically gruesome, but it similarly aims toward exhaustion as an aesthetic effect, with sex scenes spanning numerous pages.The prose is smattered with semen and full of the anxious pressure that anticipates and demands sexual release - it is tense and taut with sexuality (a book I had to take care to guard from others' view on the bus and train).

This is not intimate love, however. This is a man exercising his will and control over what is his property by virtue of Austria's patriarchal society which, as was communicated in her Women as Lovers, allows women little hope for any course in life aside from that as a wife and a mother. Gerti is her husband's receptacle as the novel bluntly puts it, and little more. She is a mother as well, but the child exists as yet another recipient of the father's almighty will and frequent beatings.

Gerti searches for salvation in another lover, Michael, but, alas, her affair, despite her hopes, is certain to come to no good end - is he not yet another man compelled above all by lust?