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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.
An almost unbearably intimate novella, The Road to the City
concentrates on a young woman barely awake to life, who fumbles
through her days: she is fickle yet kind, greedy yet abashed,
stupidly ambitious yet loving too-she is a mass of confusion. She's
in a bleak space, lit with the hard clarity of a Pasolini film. Her
family is no help: her father is largely absent; her mother is
miserable; her sister's unhappily promiscuous; her brothers are in
a separate masculine world. Only her cousin Nini seems to see her.
She falls into disgrace and then "marries up," but without any joy,
blind to what was beautiful right before her own eyes. The Road to
the City was Ginzburg's very first work, originally published under
a pseudonym. "I think it might be her best book," her translator
Gini Alhadeff remarked: "And apparently she thought so, too, at the
end of her life, when assembling a complete anthology of her work
for Mondadori.
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The Water Statues (Paperback)
Fleur Jaeggy; Translated by Gini Alhadeff
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R349
R278
Discovery Miles 2 780
Save R71 (20%)
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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.
At last, an ample English-language selection of one of
contemporary poetry's most vibrant voices
Any hall she has ever read her poetry in is invariably filled to
the gills. Women like her, girls like her, and men like her, too.
In Italy, Patrizia Cavalli is as beloved as Wistawa Szymborska is
in Poland, and if Italy were Japan she'd be designated a national
treasure. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben said of Cavalli
that she has written "the most intensely 'ethical' poetry in
Italian literature of the twentieth century." One could add that it
is, easily, also the most sensual and comical. Though Cavalli has
been widely translated into German, French, and Spanish, "My Poems
Won't Change the World" is her first substantial American
anthology.
The book is made up of poems from Cavalli's collections published
by Einaudi from 1974 to 2006, now freshly translated by an
illustrious group of American poets, some of them already familiar
with her work: Mark Strand, Jorie Graham, Jonathan Galassi, Rosanna
Warren, Geoffrey Brock, J. D. McClatchy, and David Shapiro. Gini
Alhadeff's translations, which make up half the book, are the
result of a five-year collaboration with Cavalli.
This edition includes the original Italian language poems
alongside the English translation.
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