Mixing with a group of vacationers at an Austrian boarding house, three living dead are trying to return to real life. The new novel by Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek is an expressive accompaniment to this baroque allegory - the dance of death. “I look after the dead, and everyone strokes and scratches my sweet, kind words, but this does not make the dead any more alive...” Elfriede Jelinek considers the novel “Children of the Dead ” as her main work, because she is convinced that the ideology of fascism, its authoritarian and spiritual legacy is still alive in Austria, and she skillfully shows this in the book. The novel was written ten years ago, but remains unsurpassed even by Elfriede Jelinek herself. According to critic Iris Radish, “Jelinek has composed her Austrian epic. This is the writer’s most radical creation in terms of thematic gigantomania and the fury of linguistic destruction.” The main literary value of the novel lies not in the plot, not in the idea, but in the style. Jelinek breaks the usual connections of meaning, connects the fragments in a new way, and in the process of splitting and synthesis a certain nuclear energy is released. Jelinek has mastered the plasma of the tongue, she, like a witch, brews a magic brew, and she has no equal in this witchcraft in modern literature.

If Mikhail Bulgakov in “The Master and Margarita” unleashes a whole pack of evil spirits on Moscow in order to get even with her enemies, then Elfriede Jelinek does approximately the same with the help of the dead, who are resurrected by moving into other people's bodies. Jelinek, in the person of his heroes, creates an act of revenge for the generation of his parents. She writes from the perspective of the unavenged dead. It is not for nothing that the title of the novel “Children of the Dead” is divided into two meanings: “Children is a novel of the dead.” Tatyana Nabatnikova