Fleur JaeggyRezensionen

Prose like cut-glass in an almost plotless tale of schoolgirl obsession. "Her looks were those of an idol, disdainful. Perhaps that was why I wanted to conquer her....The first thing I thought was she had been further than I had." I found it another of those oddly compelling novels I'm drawn to (like Pond) where not much happens but the writing sweeps you along.

Hier kon ik echt bijna geen touw aan vastknopen. Dit dient zich eerst aan als toneelstuk, maar wordt dan een prozatekst, waarin voortdurend andere verwanten en bedienden van de hoofdfiguur Beeklam aan het woord komen. Dat is blijkbaar een verzamelaar van beelden, ondergebracht in een onder water staande kelder van zijn huis langs de Amsterdamse grachten. Het roept inderdaad de sfeer op van desolate eenzaamheid, maar voor mij is het zodanig hermetisch dat het niet meer genietbaar is. Blijkbaar een heel vroeg werk van Fleur Jaeggy.

En el Bausler Institut, un internado femenino situado en el cantón más retrógrado de Suiza, el Appenzell, se respira una densa atmósfera de cautiverio, sensualidad inconfesada y demencia. En estos parajes por los que paseaba el escritor Robert Walser, y donde se suicidó tras permanecer treinta años en un manicomio, se desarrollan la infancia y la adolescencia de la narradora, quien las rememora desde la madurez. En ese colegio imaginario que permanece, transfigurado, en la memoria, la narradora se sentirá irremediablemente atraída por la «nueva»: hermosa, severa, perfecta, figura enigmática que parece haberlo vivido todo, y que le deja entrever algo a la vez sereno y terrible.

Op de cover van dit kleine boek is te lezen: "Zelfs in het bepaald niet weelderige oeuvre van Fleur Jaeggy is De Waterstandbeelden een bijzonder eigenaardig boek".
En daarmee is inderdaad veel gezegd. Ik weet eerlijk gezegd niet goed wat te maken van de lectuur van dit boek. Het kan helpen om het interview met haar te lezen op https://www.standaard.be/cnt/dmf20230127_96811206. Hoewel dat interview je ook niet heel veel wijzer maakt. Maar misschien is dat ook niet de bedoeling. Moet er niets worden duidelijk gemaakt. Moet er geen plot worden verhelderd. Moeten er geen antwoorden worden gegeven. Misschien gaat het meer om het scheppen van een bepaalde sfeer en omgeving waarbinnen enkele personages, scènes en evocaties rondzweven. Bevreemdend vond ik het wel maar dan omdat mijn brein nu eenmaal meer gericht is op begrijpen terwijl je om dit boek te kunnen waarderen de wens om te begrijpen beter even achterwege laat.

This short-even-for-a-novella book came as part of my 2021 New Directions subscription, and I finally picked it up.

This story--such as it is--is very dreamy and dream-like, but it is not a story as much as short vignettes involving a several people. Conversations, descriptions, memories. IMO this needed the rest of the book to pull the story together, because I have no idea if there really is a story even here.

No my kind of thing.

I want to read a hundred biographies like this.

no one's life story needs more than 1o pages.

20 korte verhalen

Ze schrijft vooral korte zinnen; ze wil niet behagen en bedrieglijk eenvoudig, radicaal.

Tight, sparse and unflinching.

a strange, cold book that seems to borrow a lot from Duras' self-conscious literariness. it has beautiful turns of phrase and is quite moving in its evocation of underloved rich boarding school girls with their undeclared queerness, but i found the casual racism toward "the black girl" unpalatable and the novel was slight, i am not sure it'll linger with me.½

I just read this after "Sweet days of discipline", one of the first works of Swiss Jaeggy (° 1940), who writes in Italian. That surely was a reading experience that puts you out of balance. Because Jaeggy uses a very chilly style, with short, chilly sentences that mainly express distance but at the same time are full of intensity. "Sweet Days of Discpline" dates from 1989, this "Proleterka" from 2001, and you can immediately notice that Jaeggy has refined her style even more, and the level of disorder is possibly even more striking.
There are also great similarities between the two books in terms of content: the absent mother (she’s in Argentine), the distant and very passive father, and the young girl who wants to taste life, but cannot break out of the cocoon of emotions she has been put in from early on. The scene in Proleterka is not a boarding school in Switzerland, but a Yugoslav cruise ship on the Mediterranean, where the girl can exceptionally spend 14 days with her father. But the atmosphere is just as intense and oppressive as in the Swiss school. All the characters around her seem to be waiting out life, in many cases even opting for death. And even though the story telling protagonist tries to get a taste of life, the distance to other people remains, it’s impossible to get some warmth and be close to someone else. Once again there is a huge haze of sadness and gloom about this story. "Proleterka" is cleverly written, but it’s a chilling reading experience. (I read this in the original Italian, I don't know whether the translations breathe the same atmosphere)

For starters: let it be clear that the title of this booklet (In English “Sweet days of Discipline”) is meant to be sarcastic. A woman looks back on her childhood, which she spent in different boarding schools in Switserland, a chilling story of suppressed feelings, coldness and gloom. On the surface, this seems like a rather classic coming-of-age novel, with all the usual ingredients of the stifling, over-disciplined life at a boarding school in Switzerland in the 1950s. But the reference, at the very beginning to Robert Walser is not an innocent link. That Swiss writer was the master of stories in which apparently nothing much happens, but which are imbued with the gravity and chillness of life, written in accurate, almost merciless prose.
And that is also the case with Jaeggy. For instance, the absent mother (who conducts her daughter's life from Brazil), and the cold, distant father who lives in hotel rooms, make clear that the unnamed narrative voice has been more or less left to her own fate. She seeks rapprochement with two other girls, one mysterious and detached, the other exuberantly extravert, with a suppressed sexual undertone, but that also not leads to much. There is a veil of gloom over the entire story, which also regularly contains references to death. Again, as with Walser, not much is happening, but it is mainly the intense, sombre atmosphere that makes this short booklet stand out; you cannot put your finger on it, but this story sticks, that’s for certain.

Verhalen als de binnenzijde van een kerk: verstild en groots, maar ook kaal en kil, waarbij elke zin een glasraam van betekenis oproept.½

Proleterka nobela labur eta bitxi honetan, kontalariak oso dosi txikietan aletzen du nerabezaroan egindako itsas bidaia bat, oroimenak lausotzen hasteko aski denbora izan duenean, berrogeita hamar urte beteta hain zuzen. Nabarmena da liburuan, lehen lerrotik hasita, heriotzak, eta bereziki suizidioak, hartzen duten nagusitasuna. Hala ere, zalapartarik gabe aipatzen dira, espanturik gabe.Bidaia iniziatiko baten narrazioa ere bada Proleterka, itsasontzian doan neskaren lehen sexu-esperientziak azalduko dizkiguna, ontzi zarpail samar bateko kamaroteko giro itogarrian eta modu bortitz samarrean gauzatuak. Eros eta Thanatos, beraz: eroen ontzia bere nora ezean daramaten bi arraunak. Horretara murrizten du emakume narratzaileak bizitza. Ez dago aitaren bilaketarik, ez aita hil beharrik: bizia berez doa, eroen itsasontzia bailitzan, portu batetik bestera, geldialdi laburrak eginez han eta hemen, azken portura iritsi arte.

3.5 stars. A compact and eerie account of a girl's boarding school experiences and relationships. Sweet Days of Disclipline is an atmospheric character sketch that works nicely because Jaeggy's writing, in Tim Parks's translation, is so concise.

(There's more on my blog here.)

"Non basta dimenticare il nome per dimenticare l'essere"

I'm enchanted and disturbed. This is a brief book of very short stories, some only two pages. There's no traditional sense of plot or character development. I would call her style gothic minimalism. It's the sense you get when you know you're all alone but you see something move swiftly from the corner of your eye. Crystalline, laconic sentences. Death, theology, and the anxious, paranoid heart at the centre of all unhappy families. Love in its contorted form, deeply claustrophobic, poisonous, deadly. Characters range from suspicious siblings to deranged husbands to devoted 13th-century mystics to a fish in a restaurant aquarium. It's the final story, a loving tribute to Ingebord Bachmann stripped of all sentimentality, that's light as air. Her stories will haunt me.

(My full review appears here: http://www.full-stop.net/2017/10/25/reviews/subashini-navaratnam/i-am-the-brothe...

This superbly concentrated book of creative nonfiction should not be knocked back like a shot, but rather sipped slowly like a good grappa. It consists of three hyper-brief biographies of writers: De Quincey, Keats, and Marcel Schwob. The lives herein are, as the original title has it, ‘congetturali’, and yet the moments of poetic speculation are few and serve only to highlight the accuracy of a certain mood and tone associated with each subject.

It took Andrew Motion more than six hundred pages to tell the story of Keats's life. Jaeggy boils it down to fewer than twenty-five. ‘Walking on the heath, Keats came across a being with a strange light in its eyes, a rumpled archangel—he recognized Coleridge. They walked together and spoke of nightingales and dreams.’ Later, in the depths of his illness: ‘They soothed him with currant jellies and compotes, some of which dripped onto a Ben Jonson first edition.’

Her skill is in the chaining-together of telling detail with no extraneous links between them, a life in a small series of close-up photographs. But the images seem to be infused with mystic significance, so perhaps not so much photographs as tarot cards. Evoking the literary circle around De Quincey, she gives us the following paragraph, full of exact specificities but veiled in mystery because of how they are catalogued:

Henry Fuseli ate a diet of raw meat in order to obtain splendid dreams; Lamb spoke of “Lilliputian rabbits” when eating frog fricassee; and his sister Mary, wielding a knife, chased a little girl who was helping her in the kitchen and then stabbed her own mother through the heart; Hazlitt was perceptive about musculature and boxers; Wordsworth used a buttery knife to cut the pages of a first-edition Burke. Coleridge, his head shrouded in a fog, read poetry badly and moaned gloomily. The dreams of Jean Paul, the crow that loved the storm, reverberated across the Lake District. This was TDQ's Western Passage.

One senses how iconic anyone's life can become when reduced to a litany of camera-flash incidents. When Marcel Schwob travels through the South Seas, she concertinas the voyage down to the following:

In Colombo he drowsily contemplated the babel of religion. There were cartloads of people praying in a cavern, a Tamil feast. He was always tired and it was hard to breathe; the hot wind blew at him and dust and flies stuck to his skin. The Australian landscape seemed sinister, long cadaverous beaches where the brush moved in the wind like the gnarled hair of dead people. In Samoa they called him Tulapla, the talk man, and kept him up late into the night telling stories. He shook the hand of King Mataafa, who looked like Bismarck.

The translation into American English, from Minna Zallman Proctor, is generally excellent, although there are a couple of minor solecisms that apparently come from unfamiliarity with the British context: she writes of something costing ‘three or four guinea’ and of climbing ‘the Ben Nevis’. But that aside, this heady alembication of lives is a stimulating, provocative experience, and Jaeggy's brevity does succeed in finding a kind of truth that doorstop biographies can only ever circle around.

This novel has the flavor of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground combined with the clipped sentences of Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten. Not un-coincidentally, the novel names Robert Walser in its first lines: "At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the Appenzell. This is where Robert Walser used to take his many walks when he was in the mental hospital in Herisau, not far from our college. He died in the snow. Photographs show his footprints and the position of his body in the snow. We didn't know the writer."

What follows is a feminine parallel to Walser's novel,Jakob, the purported diary of a well-off young man who enrolls in a servant's school where he, according to Coetzee's review of it, reflects "on the education he receives there—an education in humility—and on the strange brother and sister who offer it."

In Jaeggy's reimagining, which I take to be an homage to Walser, the setting is the equally confining all-girl boarding school, and about how relationships formed there and the discipline learned there are always at risk of becoming fetishized. For the inhabitants of the girls' school, and for Jakob von Gunten, and for the man himself Walser, such discipline necessarily makes one go truly mad.

While the nihilistic narrator of Sweet Days of Discipline claims that she and her fellow boarders "didn't know the author," (i.e. either personally or through his works), they nevertheless come to know him--and madness--through their experiences in the shared landscape.

che strano libro, non posso dire di aver colto il significato di tutti i racconti. Ma un alone di tristezza, di malinconia, ma no, qualcosa di più intenso della semplice malinconia è presente in ogni riga di questo libro.

Bella scrittura ma algida e fine a se stessa. Un gelido esercizio stilistico che non mi ha comunicato nulla, ma e' ineccepibile nella forma.

The narrator of this slim novel is a teenage girl who’s spent most of her life on extremely exclusive boarding schools, having her future mapped out by very distant parents who she rarely meets. At Bausler Institut in the Swiss alps, she makes friends with the chilly and perfect Frederique, and discovers a new side of herself, a streak of darkness and self-destructiveness.

I thought this simple set-up sounded fascinating in an Amelie Nothomb sort of way (which is something very positive in my book), but was disappointed . It’s so understated it’s virtually static, and never seems to leave ground, despite a nice, detached writing style and a melancholy tone in it’s claustrophobic world. The closeness of life in a secluded school in a small village far from everything is well captured, as is the environment. But it’s just not enough. A few late twists, not unexpected but interesting enough, save the book somewhat, but it remains front heavy and not quite worth it. Read Nothomb’s AntiChrista instead. Or Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld.½

Oooof. Each of these stories has a passage that sits heavy and uncompromising like a ball bearing in my brain.


NO DESTINY: "'Give her to me, give me the baby,' she had asked, over and over. And now her employers kept asking too. Johanna knew her employers would win. The child would grow up rich and respectable. She would be her maid."


A WIFE: "The master of the house was having fun, he'd never seen her so merry, he saw a heifer about to be sacrificed. He lifted his beer mug and made a toast: 'Auf den Tod.' the wife repeated, as though she were an echo: "auf den Tod.' 'To death', and downed her beer."


THE FREE HOUSE: "The girl opened her bag, pulled out a hammer, and struck Mrs. Heber between the eyes. It takes blood to wash away a wrong."


PORZIA: "Porzia's mad and melancholy eyes exulted in the flames that crinkled the curtains as though for a ball. In her hand she held something black that wouldn't burn."


THE TWINS: "'We don't embalm cats,' said the offended storekeeper. 'Not in Chur.'


LAST VANITIES: "This was the man she had relied on for fifty years. Amongst other things, she begged him, he mustn't let his slow, measured imagination plunge into the vast universe. And by 'vast universe', Verena meant imagining the death of his fellow men, imagining the death of his wife, plunging into the realm of premonition. 'I'm afraid,' Kurt repeated."


Ball bearings and--


THE PROMISE: "Once the formalities and simple burial were over, Ruth opened the iron gate of the family tomb and didn't leave until every letter of the name had been engraved: Vreneli Meyer Hess."


--one sphere of limpid water.½

Spoilers below

Haunting collection of loosely connected tales. Connected mostly by their macabre and decadent themes. The psychological horrors her characters inhabit creep up on you...

Boo!....Like that.

Scare you? No? Don't worry, Fleur Jaeggy will. And if she doesn't scare you, she'll certainly disturb you. And she'll do it in only 95 pages, comprising seven stories. Every story lingers, long after you've finished, like regrets.

In the title story, a husband thinks his wife is ill, as their golden anniversary approaches. He's disappointed too when she turns out not to be ill at all...well, not physically ill, as he thought. His wife doesn't much care for him wishing any kind of ill upon her, and does something discreet, though drastic, in triumphant retaliation.

An overly generous man, in "The Free House" has opened his large house to the mentally ill. He and his wife sleep in separate beds. The man's wife spies on these mentally ill while her husband sleeps. She spies on a promiscuous nineteen year-old girl in particular. Exciting! Though she'll soon wish she hadn't spied. What business do the so-called "sane" have spying on the so-called "insane" anyway?

In "The Twins," orphaned, identical twins, grow up loving only one another for the rest of their lives. I'll leave it at that.

A woman promised her father she'd find a good man to marry, in "The Promise". After he dies, in honor of his memory, she gives it a good go, and sleeps with three men in her village. Dissatisfied with all three, she's nevertheless quelled her conscience. She kept her promise to her father. She did her best to find a good man to marry. Not finding any, now she can live happily, as she is, and as her father never knew her to be, with the woman she's loved all along.

Fleur Jaeggy is a stylist's stylist. Her prose is concise. Absent are parentheticals and semi-colons. Digressions don't exist. Not to say her language isn't euphonious. Because it is. She makes her prose sound more like poetry than prose.

Jaeggy's minimalism is more minimal than Hemingway's, Carver's, and Didion's. She's heard the right words and placed them on the page in the precise order she heard them. Stripped down. Bare naked writing. Wordiness be banished, her wonderful writing declares. The irony of her minimalist style is that she packs abundant, maximal substance into each short piece. I can't wait to be eminently disturbed by her diminuitive work again.