Search results for ""Author Fleur Jaeggy""

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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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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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.

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Family, obsession, and privilege boiled down by the icy-hot Swiss-Italian master stylist Fleur Jaeggy. Even among 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.Fleshed out with Jaeggy’s austere yet voluptuous style, The Water Statues delivers like a slap an indelible picture of the swampiness of family life. ‘Reading Jaeggy is not unlike diving naked and headlong into a bramble of black rose bushes, so intrigued you are by their beauty: it’s a swift, prickly undertaking, and you emerge the other end bloodied all over’ -Daniel Johnson, The Paris Review

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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.

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