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Set in post-war Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy's novel begins simply and
innocently enough: `At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the
Appenzell'. But there is nothing truly simple or innocent here.
With the offhanded knowingness of a remorseless young Eve, the
narrator describes life as a captive of the school and her designs
to win the affections of the seemingly perfect new girl,
Frederique. As she broods over her schemes as well as on the nature
of control and madness, the novel gathers a suspended, unsettling
energy.
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The Water Statues (Paperback)
Fleur Jaeggy; Translated by Gini Alhadeff
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R332
R268
Discovery Miles 2 680
Save R64 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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A wife is suspended in a bird cage; a thirteenth-century visionary
senses the foreskin of Christ on her tongue: Fleur Jaeggy's gothic
imagination knows no limits. Whether telling of mystics, tormented
families or famously private writers, Jaeggy's terse, telegraphic
writing is always psychologically clear-eyed and deeply moving,
always one step ahead, or to the side, of her readers'
expectations. In this, her long-awaited return, we read of an
'eerie maleficent calm, a brutal calm', and recognise the timbre of
a writer for whom a paradoxical world seethes with quiet violence.
A novel about obsessive love and madness set in postwar
Switzerland, Fleur Jaeggy's eerily beautiful novel begins
innocently enough: "At fourteen I was a boarder in a school in the
Appenzell." But there is nothing innocent here. With the off-handed
remorselessness of a young Eve, the narrator describes her
potentially lethal designs to win the affections of Frederique, the
apparently perfect new girl. In Tim Parks' consummate translation
(with its "spare, haunting quality of a prose poem," TLS), Sweet
Days of Discipline is a peerless, terrifying, and gorgeous work.
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Proleterka (Paperback)
Fleur Jaeggy; Translated by Alastair McEwen
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R273
R221
Discovery Miles 2 210
Save R52 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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A fifteen-year-old girl and her father, Johannes, take a cruise to
Greece on the SS Proleterka. Jaeggy recounts the girl's youth in
her distinctively strange, telescopic prose: the remarried mother,
cold and unconcerned; the father who was allowed only rare visits
with the child; the years spent stashed away with relatives or at
boarding school. For the girl and her father, their time on the
ship becomes their `last and first chance to be together.' On
board, she becomes the object of the sailors' affection, receiving
a violent, carnal education. Mesmerised by the desire to be
experienced, she crisply narrates her trysts as well as her
near-total neglect of her father.Proleterka is a ferocious study of
distance, diffidence and `insomniac resentment.'
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The Water Statues (Paperback)
Fleur Jaeggy; Translated by Gini Alhadeff
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R349
R274
Discovery Miles 2 740
Save R75 (21%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Even among Fleur Jaeggy's singular and intricate works, The Water
Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with loneliness and
wealth's odd emotional poverty, this early novel is in part
structured as a play: the dramatis personae include the various
relatives, friends, and servants of a man named Beeklam, a wealthy
recluse who keeps statues in his villa's flooded basement, where
memories shiver in uncertain light and the waters run off to the
sea. Dedicated to Ingeborg Bachmann and fleshed out with Jaeggy's
austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statues-with its band of
deracinated, loosely related souls (milling about as often in the
distant past as in the mansion's garden full of intoxicated
snails)-delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness
of family life.
Fleur Jaeggy is often noted for her terse and telegraphic style,
which somehow brews up a profound paradox that seems bent on
haunting the reader: despite a sort of zero-at-the-bone baseline,
her fiction is weirdly also incredibly moving. How does she do it?
No one knows. But here, in her newest collection, I Am the Brother
of XX, she does it again. Like a magician or a master criminal, who
can say how she gets away with it, but whether the stories involve
famous writers (Calvino, Ingeborg Bachmann, Joseph Brodsky) or
baronesses or 13th-century visionaries or tormented siblings bred
up in elite Swiss boarding schools, they somehow steal your heart.
And they don't rest at that, but endlessly disturb your mind.
"Reading time is approximately four hours. Remembering time, as for
its author, the rest of one's life," said Joseph Brodsky of Fleur
Jaeggy's novel, Sweet Days of Displine. Now Jaeggy has come up with
seven stories, each at some deep level in dark complicity with the
others, all as terse and spare as if etched with a steel tip. A
brooding atmosphere of horror, a disturbing and subversive
propensity for delirium haunts the violent gestures and chilly
irony of these tales. Full of menace, the air they breathe is
stirred only by the FUEhn, the warm west wind of the Alps that
inclines otherwise respectable citizens to vent the spleen and
angst of life's last vanities.
New Directions is proud to present Fleur Jaeggy's strange and
mesmerizing essays about the writers Thomas De Quincey, John Keats,
and Marcel Schwob. A renowned stylist of hyper-brevity in fiction,
Fleur Jaeggy proves herself an even more concise master of the
essay form, albeit in a most peculiar and lapidary poetic vein. Of
De Quincey's early nineteenth-century world we hear of the habits
of writers: Charles Lamb "spoke of 'Lilliputian rabbits' when
eating frog fricassse"; Henry Fuseli "ate a diet of raw meat in
order to obtain splendid dreams"; "Hazlitt was perceptive about
musculature and boxers"; and "Wordsworth used a buttery knife to
cut the pages of a first-edition Burke." In a book of "blue devils"
and night visions, the Keats essay opens: "In 1803, the guillotine
was a common child's toy." And poor Schwob's end comes as he feels
"like a 'dog cut open alive'": "His face colored slightly, turning
into a mask of gold. His eyes stayed open imperiously. No one could
shut his eyelids. The room smoked of grief." Fleur Jaeggy's
essays-or are they prose poems?-smoke of necessity: the pages are
on fire.
In a vague place in England, two girls, as output of a photograph
by Lewis Carroll, chat with their guardian such vital topics as
death, emptiness, power, sources ... Arrogant, harsh and
melancholy, the two appear to assume that talking about those great
things is legitimate, and with no shame, they believe is a good
thing at their age.
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