Sweet Days of Discipline – Fleur Jaeggy
Sweet Days of Discipline – Fleur Jaeggy, translated by Tim Parks / ISBN 9781399937351 / 101-page paperback published by New Directions
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On the heels of I Am the Brother of XX and These Possible Lives, here is Jaeggy’s fabulously witchy first book in English, with a new Peter Mendelsund cover
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 Fréderique, 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.
“Clocking in at a sharp 101 pages, you’re finished before you can lodge a complaint, its contents going down as smoothly as a martini served in an ice-cold glass.” ― Kaitlin Phillips, 4Columns
“Violence dredged from the depths of consciousness is the most darkly glittering seam running through this world. Exhilarating.” ― Laura McLean-Ferris, Bookforum
