Seeds of Inspiration and Controversy

By RICHARD CORLISS

One has encouraged the world's poor women to plant 30 million trees. The other creates incendiary fables of female sexuality and subjugation. They make an odd couple, but last week they were united as Nobel laureates: Kenya's Wangari Maathai for the Peace Prize and Austria's Elfriede Jelinek for Literature. It was the second year in which women won both of the most notable Nobels.

Maathai, 64, founder of the Green Belt Movement, says the Nobel committee "is going beyond war and looking at what humanity can do to prevent war: managing our natural resources." She has inspired devotion but also controversy, suggesting that AIDS is a biological weapon that the West planted in Africa to wipe out the black race.

Jelinek, 57, swims in controversy. Her novels (Women as Lovers) and film scripts (Malina) are searingly personal and political. She writes plays scourging Austria's far-right Freedom Party and the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Jelinek was little-known abroad until now; in one day, sales of her novel The Piano Teacher jumped a million slots on Amazon.com into the top 10. That's one Jelinek story with a happy ending. --By Richard Corliss