How to describe Fleur Jaeggy? She defies categorization, expectation. Her prose style is unlike anyone’s; so is her subject matter and the structure of her strange stories. Her sentences have a blunt, stunted quality, like stone gargoyles perched above an ancient city, blank-eyed, squat and grey, bits of their noses and ears chipped off.
Jaeggy was born in 1940 in Switzerland. She speaks German, French, and Italian; she writes in Italian. She has spent most of her life in Italy. She is an insomniac. To some degree these facts are reflected in Jaeggy’s stories, which are cosmopolitan and strange.
Five of Jaeggy’s books have been translated into English. In Sweet Days of Discipline, she describes an obsessive friendship between a young girl, Frédérique, and an unnamed narrator who, like Jaeggy, attended a seemingly endless series of boarding schools. “I would have to spend the best years of my life in boarding school,” she writes. “From eight to seventeen.”
The best description of Jaeggy’s prose that I’ve encountered comes, surprisingly, from the jacket copy for I Am the Brother of XX, which applauds Jaeggy’s “champagne gothic worlds.” Yes: precisely. In Discipline, her narrator compares her cloistered schools to harems, and then to death.
“Our minds are a series of graves in a wall,” she says. And: “life was rotting.” And: “There is a mortuary look somehow to the faces of boarders, a faint mortuary smell to even the youngest and most attractive girls.”
But Frédérique, says the narrator, “is not one of the dead.”
Frédérique arrives, new to the school, with “hair straight and shiny as blades and stern shadowy eyes.” “She spoke to no one,” the narrator says. “Her looks were those of an idol, disdainful.” “Perhaps,” says the narrator, “that was why I wanted to conquer her.”
“I can’t bring myself to say I was in love with Frédérique,” she says: “it’s such an easy thing to say.” From the start, her feelings for Frédérique are expressed in terms of mastering and force — an eerie, subdued sort of violence. “I had to conquer her,” she insists. She makes progress. “Frédérique was beginning to look at me,” she says. “[S]he was asking me to spend time with her.”
In this book, characters glom on to each other like leeches, sticky and wet. The narrator’s fixation is not exclusive. One day a younger girl slips the narrator “a little love note.” She “begged me to let her become my favourite,” the narrator says, “to make a pair,” but she rejects the girl. And the headmistress, Frau Hofstetter, is infatuated with the school’s only black girl (who also goes unnamed; the narrator calls her only “the black girl”), who is the daughter of an unspecified African head of state. Frau Hofstetter “whispered and caressed her hair, her thin pigtails, her shoulders, her narrow little body and flared skirt. She counted the fingers of her hand as if she were a doll. The girl let herself be caressed like a corpse.” The relationship proves nearly fatal: the girl makes no friends, develops a cough, and seems to fade at the edges; “her hands,” says the narrator, “touch nothing but the emptiness of her thoughts.”
When another new girl shows up at Jaeggy’s boarding school — this one red-headed and disarmingly cheerful — the narrator feel her own attention dissipating. Unlike Frédérique, Micheline hoists her beauty “like a tropical bird.” “Sometimes it upset me deeply that I was neglecting Frédérique,” the narrator confesses, “and other times it gave me a kind of satisfaction.” She goes on: “Was I perhaps punishing Frédérique for my love?”
Two years ago, a short novel by the Spanish writer Andrés Barba made its English debut. Such Small Hands describes an orphanage of young girls whose equilibrium is disturbed when a newcomer, Marina, invents a new game: every night, one girl becomes a doll for the others to paint with makeup and to touch. In the end, one of the girls is torn apart.
Like Jaeggy, Barba describes the otherworldly ferocity of young girls, the mix of eroticism and violence that constitute their worlds. But Barba brings that violence fully to bear. In Sweet Days of Discipline, violence is not embodied; it is sublimated, and made eerier for it.
[Published by New Directions on November 26, 2019. 112 pages, $13.95 paperback]
Photo of Fleur Jaeggy, courtesy of New Directions Publishing.