On 1 May, only five days after news broke that a 73-year-old man, Josef Fritzl, had immured one of his seven children, his 18-year-old daughter Elisabeth, in a specially fortified cellar under his house in the small town of Amstetten in Lower Austria, and kept her there for 24 years, abusing her persistently and fathering seven more children on her, Elfriede Jelinek, Austria's Nobel Prize winning novelist, posted a short essay on her website under the title 'Im Verlassenen'. It begins: 'Austria is a small world in which the big world holds its rehearsal. The performance takes place in the very much smaller cellar dungeon in Amstetten—daily, nightly. No performance is ever missed . . . Performances are all there can ever be.'

Excuse us for a moment if we get all highbrow on you, but we really want to suggest you read "Up from the Cellar," an appreciation of Jelinek in the current London Review of Books.

We know shamefully little about the Nobelist, but writer Nicholas Spice makes a compelling case for her importance as both an interpreter of her countrymen and a towering figure of modern literature. The article discusses the Fritzl case at length, but also functions as a review of Gier, her most recent novel. It's a fairly thorough examination of a book that sounds well worth reading, but—even better—Spicer castigates the English translation, which totally frees you from the obligation of actually doing the work involved. In an age of Google-induced stupidity, it's a total win! (But seriously, read the essay, it's great.)