greed
I've read the first one hundred pages of Elfriede Jelinek's Greed. They are fierce reading; here's why:
1) Every paragraph is a small literary forest fire.
2) We live a 1/2 step away from the "state of nature."
3) Anytime we emote some self-aggrandizing grunt about how we are civilized, it is, in fact, self-delusional.
4) In the world of the first one hundred pages of Greed, heterosexual men are sperm-generating relay pumps with little capacity for empathy. Women are hyper-empathetic creatures who will disgrace themselves for the chance to be lubricated by men.
5) The book's first one hundred page's stance on gay people is unclear. Some kind of glitch in the genetic replicating machine maybe?
6) Humans are reprehensible creatures but we definitely are interesting, tantalizing, and frustrating to ourselves and others throughout the weird unfolding of our lives.
7) These first six points are too literal a reading. She short-circuits them all through an intense self-awareness, constantly injecting the writer's (is it really her?) confusion about motivations and perspective. The nearly musically rhythmic way in which she pulls it off is exquisite.