I Am the Brother of XX

by Fleur Jaeggy, Gini Alhadeff (Translator)

Overview

As concentrated as bullets, new stories by the inimitable Fleur Jaeggy

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811225991
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	07/25/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Fleur Jaeggy— “a wonderful, brilliant, savage writer” (Susan Sontag) —was born in 1940 in Zurich and lives in Milan. Her work has been acclaimed as  “small-scale, intense, and impeccably focused ”(The New Yorker) and “addictive” (Kirkus).
Gini Alhadeff won the 2018 Florio Prize for her translation of Fleur Jaeggy’s I am the Brother of XX.

 

Editorial Reviews

"Startling and original—so disturbing and so haunting."

The New York Review of Books - Cathleen Schine

"A wonderful, brilliant, savage writer."

Susan Sontag

"The fictional stories [ofI Am the Brother of XX] deal with by now familiar motifs of arson, ill health, insomnia, suicide, isolation, hauntings, vendettas and murder: some are Gothic tales of the supernatural, featuring ghosts and saints and mandrakes....And death haunts: the death of Sissi, Empress of Austria, assassinated on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1898; the suicide of the Austrian poet and painter Adalbert Stifter, who cut his throat in Linz in 1868."

Girls Schools and Gothic: Inside the Dark and Dreamlike World Of Swiss Writer Fleur Jaeggy - The New Statesman - Margaret Drabble

"How a novel could be so chilly and so passionate at the same time is a puzzle, but that icy-hot quality is only one of the distinctions of Sweet Days of Discipline."

Newsday - April Bernard

"Jaeggy seems to have crushed a glass in her palm and tweezed out a few shards for the page. Her prose is indeed extraordinary...it is also frightening."

A ZOMBIE EXISTENCE: FLEUR JAEGGY’S I AM THE BROTHER OF XX - The Rumpus - Sasha Archibald

"This book is twisted and hypnotizing and, somehow, downright lovely. Reading it is not unlike diving naked and headlong into a bramble of black rosebushes, so intrigued you are by their beauty: it’s a swift, prickly undertaking, and you emerge the other end bloodied all over."

the Paris Review - Daniel Johnson

"Nothing rivals its intensity."

The Los Angeles Review of Books

"Jaeggy is a master of the short form; her essays are charged with a nearly combustible vitality, her stories without fail are compact and devastating. Long after the pleasure of reading is over, their little hooks tug at — what is it, the heart or the mind? I Am the Brother of XX bears the thematic hallmarks of Jaeggy’s fiction...stony family relations and theology that is not merely unorthodox but downright perverse. Jaeggy’s prose is superb (and as superbly translated) as ever, her characteristic desolation as self-possessed as it is recherche´."

Financial Times

"Swiss-Italian Jaeggy, a master of the short form, again creates something unforgettable with these otherworldly stories, translated by Gini Alhadeff. They frame haunting, dreamlike moments: a 13th-century woman senses the taste of “Christ’s foreskin … tender as egg skin and very sweet”; an orphan burns alive the aristocrat who took her in “for the blasted glory of it”; a family is cursed by a possessed mandrake root. Told in Jaeggy’s characteristically jagged prose, these dark stories of madness, loss and murder are urgent and evocative. Central to each are surreal images reminiscent of paintings by Leonora Carrington or Max Ernst: “her hands, like the claws of a crustacean, clutched at a little mound of dust”. This is an intensely beautiful and original collection that bristles with a strange and often disturbing magic."

I Am the Brother of XX by Fleur Jaeggy review – otherworldly short stories - The Guardian - Claire Kohda Hazelton

"Jaeggy's prose gleams like cut gems."

The Riveter - Tess Lewis

"Finely distilled and evocative stories."

BBC

"Fleur Jaeggy’s pen is an engraver’s needle depicting roots, twigs, and branches of the tree of madness—extraordinary."

Joseph Brodsky

"Stark, surprising prose. It’s hard to capture in a line or two the strange precision of Jaeggy’s prose. Darkness seems never far away."

Fleur Jaeggy’s Portraits of Past Lives - The New York Times Book Review - Martin Riker

"Jaeggy's astute compression of narrative detail is at once serene and startling. Beneath a placid, opalescent surface lurks a threat or violence that may or may not be realized, but which contributes to the profound impression that people and their lives are unpredictable, coursing with icy, barren wildness."

Los Angeles Review of Books

2017-05-02
Most of the 21 stories in this wide-ranging collection are only a few pages long, and they're jewels of intellect and compassion.As if taking stock of life through the lens of European history, Swiss writer Jaeggy (S.S. Proleterka, 2003, etc.) finds poetry in the thoughts of characters who steal or desecrate, fall into depression, kill without knowing why, each fate revealing a hint about the soul, something from the core of life. In the gloomy title story, a man describes his love-hate relationship with his entrancing older sister. At age 8 he tells his grandmother all he wants to do when he grows up is die and, later, recalls how his mother's coffin looked after someone placed flowers on it: "Little sweets, little strawberries, a flowery meadow on our mother's skull." There's a story about a visit to a hospital burn unit ("The Aseptic Room"), an artwork that mirrors life ("Portrait of an Unknown Woman"), and a "puritanically serene" family with a Nazi past ("The Aviary"). Two stories focus on famous writers, Joseph Brodsky ("Negde") and Ingeborg Bachmann ("The Salt Water House"). Jaeggy's prose is silken, especially when violence occurs. In "The Heir," an old woman collapses in a fire that may have been set by her servant, who notes in cold, heartbreaking detail how "her hands, like the claws of a crustacean, clutched a little mound of dust." The wealthy, death-obsessed family in "The Last of the Line" lives out a fable of decadence in decay, where lakes dream and haunting portraits portend murder. And it's a testament to Jaeggy's skill that her gothic fiction can stand alongside a story such as "Names," about a visit to Auschwitz, where, "the flowers before the Wall of Death are limp. During the night they freeze." In prismatic translation from the Italian, these tiny tales sparkle with wit and worldly wisdom.

Kirkus Reviews