Sweet Days of Discipline

by Fleur Jaeggy, Tim Parks (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811229036
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/29/2019
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.40(d)

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).

Tim Parks is the author of more than twenty novels and works of nonfiction, including the best-selling Italian Neighbors and An Italian Education. His novels include Europa which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.  His essays have appeared in the The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. Parks is also a renowned translator from the Italian and lives in Verona.

Editorial Reviews

"Jaeggy’s astute compression of narrative detail is at once serene and startling. Beneath a placid, opalescent surface lurks a threat of 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 - Emily LaBarge

"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."

The Rumpus

"Reading Jaeggy 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

"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."

4Columns - Kaitlin Phillips

"Dipped in the blue ink of adolescence, Fleur Jaeggy’s pen is an engraver’s needle depicting roots, twigs, and branches of the tree of madness: Extraordinary prose. Reading time is approximately four hours. Remembering time, as for its author: the rest of one’s life."

Joseph Brodsky

"Violence dredged from the depths of consciousness is the most darkly glittering seam running through this world. Exhilarating."

Bookforum - Laura McLean-Ferris

"She has the enviable first glance for people and things, she harbors a mixture of distracted levity and authoritative wisdom."

Ingeborg Bachmann

"Like all great books, it’s really like nothing else. It’s like itself."

Gabe Habash

"This short work is packed with violent premonitions, sudden deaths, stabbings, hangings and the language of insanity. There are metaphors drawn from shrouds, altar cloths, coffins, corpses, funeral marches, gallows, guillotines, nooses, cults of the dead and, most affecting of all, stone tablets set in churchyard walls. We are all dying, even as children: as Rilke believed, we carry our deaths within us. Frédérique tells the narrator she has an old woman’s hands; the schoolgirls inhabit “a sort of senile childhood” and they have ‘a mortuary look.’"

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

"Glorious, acerbic, and sad. I have never gasped so much in sheer literary joy as while reading this novel; just trust me. It's exceptional."

Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2019 - Lithub - Emily Temple