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:	9780811229043
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/29/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
Sales rank:	478,170
File size:	499 KB

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, a Swiss-born writer living in Italy, gives her narrator an abundance of memorable lines describing a boarding school set in idyllic Switzerland. Recalling the constant machinations and undercurrents there, she comments, ``A boarding school is like a harem.'' And she seems to be right: less time is spent studying than courting favored friends. The narrator is particularly intrigued by Frederique, a disdainful girl who claims that she has ``an old woman's hands,'' which the narrator hears as a compliment. But then a frivolous new student named Micheline--she has red hair and looks ``a bit like Gilda''--causes the narrator to abandon Frederique by promising that she will give a huge ball at which all the students will dance with her charming father. Tim Parks does an admirable job of keeping the ice-cold language flowing. But the novel leaves a sense that its story line is a metaphor for something else, although it is never completely clear what, and after a while this vague profundity starts to get tiring; the ambiguous ending does not improve matters. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This novel is like a walk down an unlit alley at night, alone, in the rain. The narrator is a girl at a boarding school in postwar Switzerland. Through her heightened senses we become aware of the awakening sexuality of the young girls far away from the familiarities of home and the impending doom and madness that lurk at the gate. Imprisoned in an artificial reality, she portrays the other inmates in a sardonic light. The narrator's friendship and obsession with the ideal new girl, Frederique, bring to mind lines from Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil : ``Moment by moment, Time envelops me/ like a stiffening body buried in the snow . . ./ I contemplate the infinitesimal globe,/ and I no longer seek asylum there'' (``Craving for Oblivion''). This is an excellent purchase for any library collecting experimental fiction.-- Peggie Partello, Keene State Coll., N.H.

Library Journal

Set in a Swiss girls' boarding school, this slight Italian novel is a far cry from other examples of the lesbian inflected girls' school genre to which it belongs, although it contains several elements often found in them: discipline, regimentation, romanticism. These Jaeggy suffuses with her protagonist's own peculiar madness. Sensuality is present, too, but not sexuality, for Jaeggy's schoolgirl narrator rebuffs the adulation proffered by one girl to embark on the conquest of another. Her prize--the aloof, disdainful Frederique--eludes her as she becomes caught up in another infatuation with a fresh, charming extrovert. Long after their school days--"sweet days of discipline"--she meets Frederique again as their worlds begin to unravel and darkness and death abound. The clear, sharp prose of Tim Parks' translation holds the reader enthralled throughout.

Marie Kuda

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

Gabe Habash

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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

"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