Fleur Jaeggy

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 Fohn, the warm west wind of the Alps that inclines otherwise respectable citizens to vent the spleen and angst of life's last vanities.

60 pages ; 18 cm

125 pages ; 18 cm

"Even among Fleur Jaeggy's singular and intricate works, The Water Statues is a shiningly peculiar book. Concerned with wealth's loneliness and 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"--

"Ich wollte eine Heranwachsende beschreiben, die einem Wahn erliegt', sagt die gebürtige Schweizerin Fleur Jaeggy über ihren Roman. Sie führt den Leser in ein Mädchenpensionat der sechziger Jahre, das 'Bausler' im schweizerischen Appenzell, einen Ort, paradiesisch oder infernalisch, denn hier werden Mädchen diszipliniert, 'bis die Disziplin selbst zur Lust wird."